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DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 



Large Crown 8vo, cloth, $s. 



MODERN FRANCE (1789-1895). 

By ANDRE LEBON, 

Member of the Chamber of Deputies. 

With 26 Illustrations and a Chronological Chart of 
the Literary, Artistic, and Scientific Movement in 
Contemporary France. (Story of the Nations.) 

"We do not suppose that any one in or out of 
France could, better than M. Lebon himself, have 
executed the task entrusted to him. . . . His book 
strikes us as being a masterpiece in its way of clear, 
condensed, impartial narrative." — Daily Chronicle. 




/^ou^ %My6a^tu^ x 



[From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.) 



DISESTABLISHMENT 
IN FRANCE 



By 
PAUL SABATIER 

AUTHOR OF "THE LIFE OF ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI," ETC. 

WITH A PREFACE BY THE TRANSLATOR, ROBERT DELL, 

AND THE 

FRENCH-ENGLISH TEXT OF THE SEPARATION LAW, WITH NOTES 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

153-157 FIFTH AVENUE 
1906 






[Printed in Great Britain.] 



LC Control Number 





tmp96 025239 



[All rights reserved.] 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

translator's preface ...... 7 

author's preface to english edition . . 39 

introduction 49 

i. the origins of the crisis . • • 54 

ii. the position of the clergy in france . 95 

iii. consequences of the denunciation of the 

concordat . . . . . . . iio 

APPENDIX I. 

TEXT OF THE LAW OF IOTH DECEMBER 1905, FOR 
THE SEPARATION OF THE CHURCHES AND 
THE STATE, WITH NOTES . . . -139 

APPENDIX II. 

AN INTERVIEW WITH A SOUL IN PURGATORY (FROM 

THE SEMA1NE RELIGIEUSB OF CAMBRAl) . 1 69 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

paul sabatier Frontispiece 

the abbe loisy Facing page 112 



DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

Much has been written in England about 
the Separation of the Churches and the 
State in France, but many of the articles 
on the subject have been the work 
of Englishmen possessing but a slender 
knowledge of the facts of the case, and a 
very imperfect sympathy with the French 
character and ideas. No apology, therefore, 
is needed for the presentation to English 
readers of a study of the question by a 
Frenchman, particularly when that French- 
man is one so well known and so universally 
respected in this country as M. Paul Sabatier. 
It would be impossible to find in France a 
man better qualified by his detachment from 
party politics, by his keen historical sense, 
and by his wide and generous sympathies, to 
deal with a matter that has excited so much 
feeling. M. Sabatier is not a Catholic ; but 



8 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

no Catholic could have a more profound 
knowledge of the internal economy of the 
Catholic body, or more sympathy with all 
that is making for progress within the 
Catholic Church. He is an anti - clerical ; 
but not the most fanatical clerical could 
accuse the biographer of St Francis of Assisi 
of being anti-religious ; everything that he 
writes is inspired by an intensity of religious 
faith (I do not say dogmatic orthodoxy) 
which few of us can hope to attain. The 
debt of gratitude which every intelligent 
Catholic owes already to M. Sabatier is 
heavily increased by the book which is now 
presented to English readers. 

It will be found that M. Sabatier's account 
of the circumstances that have led to separa- 
tion, of the present conditions of the Church 
in France, and of the probable results of the 
great change, differs considerably from the 
views of many of those who have undertaken 
to instruct the English public on the subject. 
We have had the question of Separation 
treated from many points of view, varying 
from that of the Whig Superior Person, 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 9 

represented by Mr J. E. C. Bodley, 1 to that 
of the Anglican - Ultramontane, best repre- 
sented, perhaps, in certain articles of The 
Saturday Review which read like a more 
literary and less vulgar echo of the Croix. 
Few, indeed, of those who have spoken 
on the subject have grasped its true 
inwardness, or recognised the fact which 
M. Sabatier so clearly brings out, that 
Separation was sooner or later inevitable. 
It has been treated as an accidental result 
of a temporary quarrel with Rome, or as a 
measure for the repression of religion forced 
on an unwilling country by a few Jacobins 
and Freemasons. The very provisions of 



1 It is not unfair to recall the fact that in the Preface (dated 
"Easter Eve 1899") to the Second Edition of his "France,'' 
Mr Bodley foretold the imminent downfall of the Republic. 
Never was prophecy more completely falsified. The mistake 
should suggest caution in accepting Mr Bodley's view that the 
separation of the Churches and the State is a mere accident, 
and that the French nation is quite indifferent to it ; particularly 
since Mr Bodley is not always accurate in regard to facts. In a 
lecture recently delivered to the Royal Institution, he stated that 
no association is " permitted to exist " in France " without the 
authorisation of the Government, which can at any time dissolve 
it." This statement — which would apply to the associations 
cultuelles created by the Separation Law — is quite erroneous, 
(See Appendix I., p. 157.) 



10 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

the law itself have been travestied in such a 
way as to give an entirely erroneous con- 
ception of its nature. One of the leading 
London daily papers — a paper among the 
few which still adhere to the best traditions 
of the English press — published in December 
a leading article on the Separation Law, in 
which every single statement made about 
the provisions of the law was inaccurate in 
some particular. It would seem that, in 
spite of the Entente Cordiale, we have not 
yet shaken off that insularity which makes 
so many Englishmen incapable of realising 
the point of view of other nations, and 
apparently even unwilling to take the trouble 
to inform themselves accurately about the 
conditions existing in foreign countries. 

The text of the Separation Law, both in 
the original French and in an English 
translation, will; be found in the first appendix 
to the present volume, so that readers can 
judge for themselves whether or not M. 
Sabatier is justified in describing it as a 
liberating measure. Those who read through 
the law will find that it repeals every exist- 



TRANSLATORS PREFACE 11 

ing restriction on religious liberty without 
exception, and that the few regulations which 
it enacts are not of a character to interfere 
with freedom in religious matters. The 
associations for the practice of religion which 
the law creates are given certain rights 
and privileges not accorded to other associa- 
tions dfolarfas. The restrictions on their 
accumulation of capital may not be in 
accordance with English ideas, but the matter 
has to be judged, not from an English, but 
from a French point of view, and these 
provisions are entirely in accordance with 
the spirit of the whole French law Whether 
or not it is desirable to leave associations 
and institutions as free from all control of 
the State as they are in England is a matter 
into which this is not the place to enter ; 
but it may be surmised from the extent to 
which land, on the one hand, is passing in 
Canada and Ireland into the hands of unpro- 
ductive communities, and the foundation of 
bogus charitable institutions, on the other, 
has become in England a favourite occu- 
pation of the swindler, that the question 



12 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

is not one which can be decided off-hand. 
Much has been made of the provisions of 
Articles 26, 34 and 35, which forbid the 
use of places of worship for political meet- 
ings, and impose penalties on ministers of 
religion who in such places insult or defame 
public officials, or incite their congregations 
to illegality or sedition. The first of these 
provisions has a parallel in English law, 
and cannot be called unreasonable in view 
of the fact that the churches that are by 
law public property are handed over to 
the religious bodies permanently and free 
of charge. Nor do the other two provi- 
sions seem excessively severe. Ministers of 
religion are given special privileges in their 
churches ; they may not be interrupted what- 
ever they say, and it is a legal offence even 
to express dissent from their remarks. It 
is a reasonable argument that this privilege 
should be used only for the purpose for 
which it is granted, and that ministers of 
religion should not be allowed to take 
advantage of their privileged position to 
inflict an insulting attack on the Govern- 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 13 

ment of their country on an audience which 
is forbidden to dissent from it. Neither the 
Protestants nor the Jews have made any 
objection to these provisions ; those who 
object to them thereby proclaim their desire 
to insult and defame public officials from the 
pulpit or the altar, and to incite their con- 
gregations to sedition and illegal action. 

It will be seen that M. Sabatier takes an 
optimistic view of the future of religion in 
France. We may safely follow him in that 
view ; but we must be careful not to draw 
conclusions against which he expressly guards. 
M. Sabatier does not tell us that the 
Catholicism of to-morrow is going to win 
an immediate triumph inside the French 
Church. On the contrary, he foresees that 
for some years to come the French Church 
is likely to be more than ever dominated by 
the " insolent and aggressive faction," to use 
Newman's words, which has during the past 
century brought disgrace and ruin upon 
Catholicism. Everything points to that 
conclusion, much as one would like to hope 
the contrary. There is no sign that the 



14 TRANSLATORS PREFACE 

responsible authorities either in Rome or in 
France have learned anything from the 
experience of the past. There is, on the 
contrary, every reason to fear that the free 
hand which Separation gives to Rome will 
be used to carry to still further lengths the 
old policy of fostering superstition and repress- 
ing initiative and intellectual life. When 
Pius IX. declared that the Roman Church 
could not come to terms with " progress, 
liberalism, and modern civilisation, ,,x he 
was not so much enunciating a doctrine as 
stating a fact. The principles and ideals 
of Vaticanism — of the existing official 
Roman Church — are wholly at variance 
with those of modern philosophy, modern 
science, modern criticism and modern de- 
mocracy. There can be no reconcilia- 
tion until the world ceases to move or 
the official Church consents to do so. 
The history of the Church shows that 
Catholicism as such is incompatible with no 
stage in human progress ; and the claim of 

1 See the Syllabus of condemned propositions attached to 
the Encyclical Quanta Cura of Pius IX., Proposition 80. 



TRANSLATORS PREFACE 15 

the Catholic Church is a valid one only if 
Catholicism be the expression of the religious 
consciousness of the human race, or the 
nearest possible approach to such expression. 
But Vaticanism conceives of the Catholic 
Church as an exclusive international sect, 
confined for ever to the ideas of the 
thirteenth century. 

The recent papal Encyclical Vehementer nos 
addressed to the French bishops is a strik- 
ing illustration of that fact. The " rights" 
that the Pope claims for the Church (that is, 
for all practical purposes, the Papacy) are in 
substance those claimed by Boniface VIII. 
in his famous Constitution Unam Sanctam of 
1303. Those "rights" — which may be summed 
up in the dictum of Boniface VIII., "The 
temporal authority must be subject to the 
spiritual power " — are incompatible, not merely 
with democracy but with any sort of civil 
autonomy : they involve a pure theocracy. 
The Pope's objection to the Separation Law 
has little to do with its actual provisions ; it 
is primarily an objection in principle to a 
regime of religious toleration, liberty and 



16 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

equality, in which the Roman Catholic Church 
has the same rights and liberties aS other 
religious bodies, no more and no less. It 
applies, then, with no less force to England 
than to France, and the inference is inevitable 
that the Papacy tolerates the position of the 
Roman Catholic Church in this country, only 
because and so long as Roman Catholics are 
in a small minority. 1 Until the principles of 
the Encyclical Vehementer nos are abandoned 
by the Papacy, the fear of " papal aggres- 
sion " cannot be considered groundless, though 
present circumstances in England do not 
make it a matter of practical importance, since 
the Catholic body in this country is making 
no appreciable headway. In thus claiming 
for the Catholic Church the right to be placed 
by the State in a privileged position, Pius X. 
does but follow his three immediate prede- 
cessors. Gregory XVI., Pius IX., and Leo 
XIII. all explicitly condemned religious tolera- 

1 A pastoral by Mgr. Bonomelli, Bishop of Cremona, the 
thesis of which was merely that the Separation of Church and 
State is better as a rule in existing conditions, and that the 
Catholic Church has nothing to fear from a regime of liberty, 
was condemned by the Pope immediately after its publication 
(February 1906). 



TRANSLATORS PREFACE 17 

tion and the system of a "free Church in a 
free State." Just as Pius X. declares that the 
Church is "persecuted," because it is deprived 
of privilege and domination, so did Leo 
XIII. declare it to be an outrage on the 
Papacy that the Italian Government tolerated 
Protestant chapels and societies in Rome. 1 
So did Pius IX. anathematise those who 
deny that "the Catholic religion is to be 
recognised as the sole religion of the State 
to the exclusion of all others." 2 Cardinal 
Mathieu is reported to have hailed the author 
of the Encyclical Vehementer nos as a second 
Hildebrand. It may respectfully be doubted 
whether the part is one peculiarly suited to 
his Holiness ; and, besides, it is a little out of 
date. The French Republic will never go 
to Canossa ; and the enemies of the Church 
in France have received with joyous hilarity 
a pronouncement which supplies them with 
one more argument for their contention that 
the Roman Church is a standing menace to 
civil autonomy, and a potential danger to 

1 Address to an English pilgrimage, January 1901. 

2 See the Syllabus, Proposition 77. 

B 



18 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

every civilised State. Should the Pope — as 
one cannot believe will be the case — put his 
principles into practice and call on French 
Catholics to rebel against their country, the 
result will be the same as was the result in 
England of the similar policy of Pius V. 
Rome will lose France for ever. 

It would seem, then, to be inevitable that 
the official Church should sooner or later 
come into conflict with every democratic 
State. If Pius X. lays the tiara at the feet 
of an heretical and schismatic emperor, it 
is not because he is Pope "by the grace of 
God and the favour of William II.," but rather 
because the Vatican, ever leaning on the 
arm of flesh, finds its natural ally in Prussian 
Caesarism, in the only effective autocracy left 
in Europe — the Tsar and the Sultan being 
but broken reeds. 

The scandal that this unholy alliance has 
caused to intelligent French Catholics (as 
M. Sabatier points out) is equalled by the 
shame with which they see marks of favour 
showered on the men who were responsible 
for the epidemic of diabolism which dragged 



TBANSLATOITS PREFACE 19 

the name of Catholic in the mire. 1 One 
of Leo Taxil's dupes is now the papal 
Secretary of State. Another, who was more 
active and no less prominent in his way, 
was one of the first French priests honoured 
by the present Pope, received an honorary 
degree from a Catholic university, enjoys the 
special confidence of his bishop, and edits the 
official diocesan magazine of Cambrai. 2 In 
Appendix II. (page 169) will be found some 
extracts from recent numbers of that magazine 
which may help to explain to the English 
public why the French people is estranged from 
the Church. Perhaps nothing has contributed 
more to that estrangement than the glaring 
contrast between the immunity given by the 
ecclesiastical authorities to every form of 
superstition, and the severity with which the 
same authorities visit any attempt to make 
Catholicism intelligible to the modern mind. 
The preposterous cultus of "St Expedit" (a 
gentleman who apparently originated in a 
pun) and of St Anthony of Padua, whose 
popularity arises from the fact that they are 

1 See pages 76-84. * See page 119, footnote 1. 



20 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

supposed to be universal providers, not of 
spiritual blessings, but of temporal advantages ; 
the grossly materialistic development of the 
once symbolical and mystical devotion to the 
Sacred Heart, based on " revelations" which 
have only to be compared with the Gospels 
to make their unreality glaring: 1 these and 
other manifestations of a religious mentality 
hardly more exalted than that of a savage 
are enough to revolt, as they have revolted, 
the majority of men not only in France but 
also in almost every Catholic country. But 

1 The broad difference between the representation of our 
Lord in the Gospels and that in the Revelations of Blessed 
Margaret Mary Alacoque is the difference between simplicity 
and vulgarity. Some of the utterances put into our Lord's 
mouth in the Revelations are nauseous, others are at variance 
with the whole spirit of the Gospels (see page 70). Among 
other promises attributed to our Lord in the Revelations is one 
that any one who receives the Holy Communion on the first 
Friday of nine successive months shall not die without the 
last Sacraments, and shall infallibly be saved ! 

The present development of the cultus of the Sacred Heart 
approaches perilously near to one of the early heresies. The 
Sacred Heart is now completely personified, and is practically 
the Fourth Person of the Trinity. Popular prayers and hymns 
speak of the voice, hands, feet, face and mind of the Sacred 
Heart. A Jesuit Father, preaching at Wimbledon a few years 
ago, said, in the course of his sermon, " Nothing, dear brethren, 
could be more painful to the heart of the Sacred Heart than/ 
etc. The cultus also takes other forms, perhaps even more 
strange. In at least one French convent — for all I know, in 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 21 

even they are nothing compared to the 
fact that, after every Low Mass throughout 
Catholic Christendom, a prayer is said which 
was first ordered by Leo XIII. in 1886 to sup- 
port Leo Taxil's anti-masonic agitation, and 
remains a standing witness to the fact that 
the official Church was hopelessly committed 
to belief in a hoax which would not have 
taken in an intelligent child educated any- 
where but in a clerical school. 1 Can any 
rational person — be he Catholic or not — 

many others— it is customary for the nuns to preface conversa- 
tions and begin letters with the remark, " Let us make an 
appointment to meet in the Sacred Heart n ; and I am assured 
by French Catholics that this is a common cant phrase of the 
devotes. 

Probably the rapid growth of the cultus of the Sacred Heart 
may be in part explained — and excused — as a reaction against 
the Monophysite tendency of current orthodoxy, and in particu- 
lar of the theological schools. 

1 This prayer is as follows : 

" Holy Michael Archangel, defend us in the day of battle ; 
be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the 
devil — may God rebuke him, we humbly pray ; and do thou, 
Prince of the heavenly host, thrust down to hell Satan and all 
wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of 
souls. Amen." 

Leo XIII. had already, in his Encyclical against Free- 
masonry of 20th April 1884, specially recommended prayer 
to St Michael as a specific against the " Sect of Satan." That 
Encyclical really started the anti-masonic campaign, and sowed 
the seeds of the Satanist superstition, of which Leo Taxil reaped 
the harvest 



22 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

deny that there is something radically wrong 
with a system which produces such fruits as 
these ? 

If the present Pope has thus, like his im- 
mediate predecessor, encouraged superstitions 
and devotional novelties he has shown no 
such tenderness towards new modes of 
thought and intellectual developments. In 
that regard, indeed, he has gone back on 
the later policy of Leo XI I L, who refused 
to condemn the Abbe Loisy, or the critical 
movement of which he is the leading repre- 
sentative in the Catholic Church. Pius X. 
condemned M. Loisy and the critical move- 
ment within four months of his accession ; he 
has since packed the Biblical Commission 
with ecclesiastics of reactionary tendencies 
possessing no special knowledge of biblical 
questions ; has dismissed Friar David 
Fleming, O.F.M., from the secretaryship 
of that Commission, and replaced him by a 
fanatical obscurantist; and has crowned his 
work by placing at the head of the Com- 
mission — Cardinal Merry del Val ! The 
Commission, which was appointed by Leo 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 23 

XIII. to deal with biblical questions from the 
expert standpoint, has thus become a second 
Inquisition, presided over by a quondam 
follower of Leo Taxil. Moreover, there is 
every reason to believe that we are shortly 
to have a new Syllabus of condemned pro- 
positions taken from the works of M. Loisy 
and other neo- Catholic writers. Such a docu- 
ment has been in preparation for quite two 
years, and it is probable that its publication 
has been suspended only because it was 
thought desirable to wait until French Separa- 
tion was an accomplished fact. Now that 
that is the case, semi-official announcements 
of the impending publication have appeared 
in the Catholic press in France, England and 
other countries. When it is remembered 
that M. Loisy's submission to the decree 
which placed his works on the Index — a 
submission in which historical independence 
was carefully guarded — has never been 
formally accepted, it will be recognised that 
the situation is grave. The " young 
Catholics " will never voluntarily leave the 
Church, but if they are forced to choose 



24 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

between excommunication and repudiation 
of the critical method with its established 
results, there can be only one choice for any- 
honest man. For the sake of religion in 
France and elsewhere, it is earnestly to be 
hoped that that choice will not be thrust 
upon them by rulers who cannot discern the 
signs of the times ; but it would be futile 
to ignore the danger that it may. In any 
case, it is almost impossible to hope that the 
immediate result of Separation will not be 
to place the French Church more than ever 
in the hands of the extreme Ultramontane 
party, backed by all the power of Rome. 

Nevertheless, it is still possible to be 
optimistic for the future, not, indeed, of 
Vaticanism, but of Catholicism. The neo- 
Catholic movement is sure of ultimate victory 
for the very reason that it is in line with all 
the best tendencies of the age. Its triumph 
is as certain as was that of the Aristotelian 
philosophy when popes and theologians 
unanimously condemned it, and the works of 
Aristotle were burned by the common hang- 
man ; or that of the Copernican astronomy 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 25 

when the Inquisition declared that it was 
" absurd and false in philosophy and formally 
heretical/' Apparently Galileo did not say, 
11 Eppur si mnove " ; but there have been many 
papal condemnations in history besides his own 
to which the rejoinder is exactly appropriate, 
and the condemnation of M. Loisy by Pius 
X. is one of them. The triumph of neo- 
Catholicism may come only after the Roman 
Catholic Church in France, and in many other 
countries, has been reduced to the proportions 
of an insignificant sect, wholly out of touch 
with the rest of the nation ; but come it 
will. And it should be the hope of all who 
have at heart the progress of Christianity 
that the rulers of the Roman Catholic Church 
will not repeat the criminal folly of the rulers 
of the Synagogue. Protestantism has not 
the smallest chance of obtaining any effective 
hold on France any more than on Spain or 
Italy. M. Sabatier's decided opinion on 
this point is also that of another non-Catholic 
Frenchman, M. Paul Desjardins (the founder 
of the Libres Entretiens)? who, in his admir- 

1 Seepage 133. 



26 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

able little book, " Catholicisme et Critique," l 
says : — 

" Car d 'observer si le christianisme catholique, 
forme probablement unique oil nous puissions, 
en Occident, en France, realiser une cite des 
esprits, va glisser a la superstition populaire, 
ou bien remonter a la vie intellectuelle originale 
— cette incertitude nous touche." 

The religion of France, then, depends on 
Catholicism, and many will suffer if the 
reconciliation of Catholicism and modern 
civilisation is brought about only — as there 
is too much reason to fear will be the case — 
after the Ultramontanes and the fanatics 
have had their way unchecked in the French 
Church, and have brought it to the inevitable 
ruin that awaits a policy of ignorant pride 
and blind obstinacy. 

Many lessons may be drawn by English 
readers from M. Sabatiers book. We have 
reached a turning point in English politics. 
For the first time it would seem that this 

1 Paris : aux bureaux des Libres Entretiens, 1905 (2 fr. net), 
page 5. 



TRANSLATORS PREFACE 27 

country, which has been for twenty years 
potentially a democracy, is about to become 
one actually. We stand politically much 
where France stood in 1871. When every 
allowance has been made for differences of 
training and temperament, it remains probable 
that the evolution of democracy in Great 
Britain will follow on the whole the same 
general lines as in France. In particular it 
may be taken as almost certain that the 
democracy will be anti-clerical, or — shall we 
say ? — " laique" Whether and how far anti- 
clericalism will develop into opposition to 
this or that Church or even to religion 
depends on the Churches themselves. The 
English democracy can hardly resist the 
natural and inevitable tendency to differentiate 
between the functions of Church and State 
— what is called in France the "laicisation " of 
the State — with its necessary corollary, the 
cessation of State " establishment " of religion. 
If the members of the Church of England 
are wise they will learn from the mistakes of 
the Church in France to be ready for that 
change when it comes ; or — which would be 



28 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

wisest of all — they will themselves prepare 
it. Freedom will be cheaply purchased even 
at some pecuniary sacrifice, and the fetters 
of establishment in England are even more 
galling and degrading than were those of 
the Concordat in France, where at any 
rate the creeds, liturgy and worship of 
the Church were not at the mercy of Par- 
liament. 

May the English clergy of every communion 
also learn from the experience of France the 
fatal folly of clerical interference in politics. 
Indeed the lesson may be learnt nearer home ; 
the Church of England has suffered irre- 
trievable losses by her identification in the 
past with the Conservative party. But the 
remedy is not to identify her with some other 
party — still less to form a " Church' ' party, 
most fatal mistake of all. Dr Clifford tele- 
graphing quasi-apostolic benedictions to Liberal 
candidates would be as distasteful to French 
Republicans (and as fatal to the success of 
the candidates whom he patronised) as is a 
country curt declaring from the altar that 
those who vote for the Radical candidate will 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 29 

be damned. 1 And, so soon as the English 
democracy has freed itself from leading strings 
and become conscious of itself and its powers, 
such interference will be resented in this 
country. For the assumption underlying such 

1 It is a great mistake to suppose that clericalism is to be 
found only among Catholics and High Churchmen. It is, on 
the contrary, very prevalent among English Nonconformists in 
various forms. One of the most thoroughly clericalist move- 
ments that we have had in England for a long time was that of 
" Passive Resistance " ; it was also essentially anti-democratic, 
as was shown by the unconstitutional appeal to the King to over- 
ride the representatives of the people. If individual citizens 
were allowed to refuse to pay taxes because they disapproved 
of this or that purpose to which taxation is applied, government 
would give place to anarchy, and the very existence of a 
civilised community would become impossible. Probably the 
Passive Resisters would admit that fact as a general rule ; 
their action, then, implicitly involved a claim to a special 
privilege because they had, or thought they had, religious grounds 
for their objection — in principle the same claim that is made by 
the Pope and the French clericals. Indeed, " passive resistance " 
to the Separation Law is exactly what some of the French 
clericals are advocating in so many words. The rights of 
conscience ought to be respected, but the consciences of a good 
many religious people seem to be in a morbidly unhealthy con- 
dition ; their tendency to whine about " persecution, 55 whenever 
they are not allowed to disregard the rights of the community 
as they please, brings religion into contempt. To avoid the 
suspicion that these remarks are inspired by prejudice or 
partisan feeling, perhaps it may be well to add that personally 
I should like to see all State-supported schools placed entirely 
under public control, all religious tests for teachers (including 
that involved in the requirement that they shall teach 
"undenominational" religion) abolished, and the education 
given at the public expense limited to secular subjects. 



30 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

interference is that the minister of religion 
as such is specially qualified to lay down 
absolutely what is right or wrong in politics. 
Moreover, there is sure to be the suspicion of 
ulterior motives, of a desire to promote the 
interest of some particular Church. In the 
recent general election two clergymen of the 
Church of England took a prominent part in 
the electoral campaign of a Labour candidate 
in a great midland town. The local corre- 
spondent of a leading Church paper thus 
commented on the fact (the italics are mine) : 

" The question of the desirability of the 
clergy taking an active part in political elections 
is one upon which there may be two opinions ; 
for the Church in has suffered con- 
siderably in times past from similar action, 
when that influence was exerted in a contrary- 
direction. But the result of the present clerical 
action has made this clear : that when the clergy 
of the Church, by working single-heartedly 
among the working-classes, gain the confidence 
of the ' people/ their influence at elections 
may become a very important factor. How 
valuable to the Church such a factor generally 
employed in an election might prove when 
Church interests %vere directly at stake it is 
not difficult to see." 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE SI 

Now, I am convinced from personal know- 
ledge of the two clergymen concerned in this 
particular case that they were actuated by 
nothing but a sincere desire to support the 
political cause in which they believed ; never- 
theless, they might with advantage reflect on 
the passage just quoted. 

Are we, then, it will be said, to make a 
sharp cleavage between our religion and our 
politics, and is religion to have no influence 
on our lives as a whole? By no means. It 
is our business to apply our Christian prin- 
ciples to politics as to everything else, and to 
support what we conscientiously believe to be 
the right policy, that is, the policy best for 
the community as a whole. But it is the 
essence of clericalism to suppose that there 
can ever be an absolutely right or an 
absolutely wrong policy, or to assume that 
a Christian — or a Churchman or a Non- 
conformist — must or ought to take a 
particular side on any social, political, or 
economic question. One man may con- 
scientiously believe that private property in 
land is bad for the community, another that 



32 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

it is the best system ; two men may agree 
that existing social conditions are urgently in 
need of reform, but they may differ entirely 
as to the best method of reforming them, or 
even as to whether any reform is possible. 
A minister of religion has a mission far above 
party politics : it is his business to appeal to 
the consciences of men of every shade of 
political and economic opinion, and he cannot 
do so if he begins by begging all the questions 
and assuming that this or that political view 
is the only moral one. For on no other 
assumption has he the right to appeal to his 
flock to take that view. His duty is to 
insist that every Christian is bound in political 
matters to support that policy which he con- 
scientiously believes to be best, not for his 
own individual interests, nor merely for his 
own class or sect, but for the community as a 
whole. If the clergy confined themselves to 
the attempt to get that principle universally 
recognised and acted upon, they would find 
their time fully occupied. By attempting to 
impose a particular application of the principle 
they only compromise the principle itself and 



TRANSLATORS PREFACE 33 

impair their own influence as religious and 
moral teachers. 

The whole experience of the last thirty- 
five years in France — and in particular the 
unfortunate interference of Leo XIII. in 
French politics 1 — should teach all the clergy 
of every kind that it will be as fatal a mistake 
to patronise the nascent English democracy 
as to ban it. " There can be no question,' 5 
says a recent Anglican writer for whom I 
have the greatest possible regard and more, 
41 as to the call that Christ is, in them [i.e. 
the Labour party], making to His Church — to 
bless, to sympathise, to lead." "To sympa- 
thise?" yes, provided the sympathy be not 
too effusive. " To bless ? " possibly, if the 
blessing be not too unctuous. But "to 
lead?" certainly not. Such a claim will 
never be admitted by any real democracy. 
For democracies do not propose to place 
themselves under spiritual directors. 

One other point in the following book, in 
which there are so many points worthy of 
careful attention, may with advantage be 

1 See pages 55-63. 
C 



34 TRANSLATORS PREFACE 

commended to the particular notice of 
English readers. I mean M. Sabatier's 
allusion to the alliance between the German 
Emperor and the Vatican. 1 Nobody could 
be less chauvinistic than M. Sabatier or 
more eager for the maintenance of peace 
among nations. But, like all who do not 
blind themselves to facts, he sees that so 
long as the German people remain without 
any control over, or even any voice in, the 
foreign policy and external relations of the 
German Empire, the German Government 
must be a standing menace to every free and 
democratic nation. So far as foreign policy 
is concerned that Government is an auto- 
cracy ; and autocrats consult first the interests, 
not of their country, but of their dynasty. 
Every advance in democracy made in other 
countries is a menace to Prussian Caesarism, 
and it is in the nature of things that Caesar 
should make it the chief aim of his policy to 
sow discord between free nations, and to 
prevent them from growing strong enough 
to resist his dictation. The alliance with the 

1 See page 132. 



TRANSLATORS PREFACE 35 

Vatican is equally natural ; the cause of civil 
and of ecclesiastical autocracy is one. The 
fact of that alliance has as yet hardly been 
realised in England, though its symptoms 
are to be seen in almost every country. 
Not long ago a Milanese paper, called the 
Perseveranza — ably conducted but not widely 
circulated, and in everything but name a 
clericalist organ — declared that, if Italy ever 
had to choose between England and Germany, 
it was her duty to prefer Germany. That 
is the policy of the Vatican ; not that there 
is any particular hostility to England, but 
those who control the Vatican policy see 
clearly that their last hope is in the German 
Emperor, who rules Germany with the aid 
of the clerical Centre. The policy of the 
present Pope is to create a clerical party in 
Italy on the lines of the German Centre, in 
order to offer the monarchy an alliance against 
the advanced parties. It is most unlikely that 
the monarchy will accept such compromising 
aid, and it is certain that the general Italian 
view in regard to England is very different 
from that of the Vatican. But it is well to 



36 TRANSLATORS PREFACE 

know how matters stand. As in Italy, so in 
France, in Holland, in Belgium, the friends 
of the German Government are mostly to be 
found among the clericals ; in England the 
Vatican policy has been more cautiously pur- 
sued, but certain Catholic writers 1 have done 
their best (with little or no success) to estrange 
public feeling from France. It is said that in 
Berlin there are dreams of a revival of the 
Holy Roman Empire ; perhaps, like Paris, 
it would be well worth a Mass ! 

There is no occasion for panic, or even 
for serious alarm, except on the part of 
Roman Catholics, who see their Church 
once more compromised in political intrigue 
and dragged along a path which leads to 
certain ruin. The German people already 
chafe under the clerical yoke, and the days 
of Prussian autocracy and clerical domination 
are undoubtedly numbered. Nevertheless, it 
is most desirable that in this country, as 
elsewhere, it should be generally understood 
that Pope and Emperor have united to make 

1 Notably Lord LlandafT, Mr Wilfrid Ward, and the Rev. 
William Barry, D.D. 



TRANSLATORS PREFACE 57 

a last stand against democracy and progress, 
and that democratic nations should be on 
the defensive. 

In conclusion, a word or two of explanation 
may be made as to certain phrases in the 
translation. I have translated "libre pensee" 
and "libre penseur" by "free thought " and 
"free thinker,'' since there are no other 
English terms which would convey their 
meaning. But I would warn the reader 
against the supposition that these terms, as 
M. Sabatier uses them, connote any suggestion 
of atheism or hostility to religion. Again, I 
have translated the word "laique" by "lay" 
in contexts where possibly "secular" might 
be more accurate, because the term "secular" 
has come to contain a suggestion of "anti- 
religious." The phrase "jeunes catholiques' 
occurs frequently in the book, and I have as 
a rule retained its literal equivalent in the 
English in preference to "neo - Catholics," 
since it may be accounted almost a technical 
term for the party which it describes. It is 
hardly necessary to say that there is no 
reference in it to the age of the individuals 



38 TRANSLATORS PREFACE 

who compose that party. Another technical 
term, " bonne presse," as applied to the so- 
called religious press run by the Assump- 
tionists, I have usually left untranslated ; it 
explains itself. 

It will be found that there are a few 
differences from the original French edition, 
mostly in the form of additions. These have 
all been made by M. Sabatier himself, with 
the exception of a few notes enclosed in square 
brackets, which are mine. For the Appendices 
I am responsible ; but I have to thank M. 
Leopold Dor (Licencie-es-Lettres et Avocat 
au Barreau de Marseille) for his kind help 
in revising the English text of the Separation 
Law and the notes thereon. 



March 1906. 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE 
ENGLISH EDITION 

Since the following pages were written Pope 
Pius X. has fulminated the condemnation of 
the Separation Law. 1 It is a literary effort in 
the grand style, a little unexpected, perhaps, 
as coming from the pen of a successor of 

1 Encyclical Vehementer nos, dated nth February 1906. It 
was published both in Latin and in French in the Osservatore 
Romano of 18th February 1906. The following is the text of 
the condemnation properly so-called : 

"Itaque, Apostolici Nostri officii memores, quo sacrosancta 
Ecclesiae iura a quavis impugnatione defendere ac servare 
integra debemus, Nos pro suprema, quam obtinemus divinitus, 
auctoritate, sancitam legem, quae Rempublicam Gallicanam 
seorsum ab Ecclesia separat, reprobamus ac damnamus ; idque 
ob eas quas exposuimus causas : quod maxima afficit injuria 
Deum, quern solemniter eiurat, principio declarans Rem- 
publicam cuiusvis religiosi cultus expertem ; quod naturae ius 
gentiumque violat et publicam pactorum fldem ; quod con- 
stitution! divinae et rationibus intimis et libertati adversatur 
Ecclesiae; quod iustitiam evertit, ius opprimendo dominii, 
multiplici titulo ipsaque conventione legitime quaesitum ; quod 
graviter Apostolicae Sedis dignitatem ac personam Nostram, 
Episcoporum Ordinem, Clerum et Catholicos Gallos offendit. 
Propterea de rogatione, latione, promulgatione ejusdem legis 
vehementissime expostulamus ; in eaque testamur nihil quid- 
quam inesse momenti ad infirmanda Ecclesiae iura, nulla 
hominum vi ausuque mutabilia." 

39 



40 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 

St Peter who but lately declared so loudly his 
desire " instaurare omnia in Christo T x We 
have indeed a restoration here, but a restora- 
tion far more reminiscent of Boniface VI I L 
than of the Master of the Gospels — "meek 
and lowly of heart." 

The impression produced in France by 
the publication of this document is easy to 

" Therefore, being mindful of Our apostolic office, by which 
we are constrained to defend the sacred rights of the Church 
from any assault whatsoever and to preserve them in their 
integrity, We, by the supreme authority committed to Us by 
God, reprobate and condemn the law now enacted, which sepa- 
rates the French Republic from the Church ; and this We do for 
the reasons which we have set forth : because it inflicts a very 
great injury on God, whom it solemnly abjures by declaring 
that the Republic has in principle no part in any religious 
worship whatsoever ; because it violates natural and human 
rights and the good faith of public treaties ; because it is opposed 
to the divine institution, the essential principles and the liberty 
of the Church ; because it is a subversion of justice in that it 
suppresses a right of dominion legitimately acquired by 
manifold titles and even by a convention ; because it is a 
grave offence against the dignity of the Apostolic See and 
Our own person, and against the episcopal and clerical orders 
and the Catholics of France. Wherefore We protest with 
our utmost strength against the introduction, the voting and 
the promulgation of the said law ; and at the same time We 
declare that no change whatever can avail to weaken the rights 
of the Church which no human force or daring can alter." 

1 "To restore all things in Christ," Eph. i. 10. Programme 
of the pontificate of Pius X.; see the Bull E supremi apostolatus 
cathedra of 4th October 1903. The complete sentence is as 
follows : " in dispensatione plenitudinis temporum y instaurare 
omnia in Christo quae in caelis et quae in terra sunt in ipso" 



TO THE ENGLISH EDITION 41 

describe: the extreme Right has received it 
with noisy and joyous acclamations ; the Centre 
with astonishment and curiosity, the attitude of 
well-bred persons encountering a procession ; 
the Left again with joy, the joy of soldiers 
when they meet the enemy sooner than they 
expected, and notice with satisfaction that 
he exactly answers to the description that 
they have been given of him. The chief 
result of this solemn pronouncement is that 
from henceforth Pius X. will know his own. 
He has sifted them out. Hitherto the 
Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion has 
been reputed to be that of the majority of 
Frenchmen ; but henceforth it will no longer 
be so. For, if the only true Catholics in 
our country are those who have applauded 
the papal encyclical, then Catholics are with- 
out question in a very insignificant minority, 
even if one includes in their number those 
who swell their ranks, as they themselves 
loudly declare, as adherents not of religious 
but of political Catholicism. 1 

1 Every one knows that one of the results of the Dreyfus 
afrair has been the development of surprising and paradoxical 



42 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 

That France, whose coming victory over 
the other France is proclaimed by the Vicar 
of Jesus Christ, is the France represented 
by the Autorite, the Gaulois, the Croix, the 
Gazette de France, the Peuple Frangais, the 
Soleily the Univers et le Monde, the VZritt 
Frangaise} All these papers have joined as 
one man in the opinion that the Encyclical 
Vehementer nos puts the new law out of 
court, and is a formal declaration of war 
against the work of the representatives of 
the nation. I trust that these papers, how- 
ever well qualified they may be to interpret 
the pontifical mind, are, nevertheless, mis- 
taken ; I wish to think that, above the 

forms of Catholicism. An eminent Catholic presented to us 
in the Univers so early as 1902 a "clerical atheist" of whom, 
though he did not precisely make him a Father of the Church, 
he had many complimentary and flattering things to say such 
as ecclesiastics do not lavish at random : — 

"A kind of lay Benedictine, he is the possessor of a rare 
erudition, a sincere conscience, a profoundly French soul and 
the heart of a child. ... His speciality in unbelief, if I may 
so express it, is that he asserts himself to be at once atheist 
and materialist, Catholic and clerical." 

But perhaps this form of Catholicism is neither so novel nor 
^so paradoxical as it seems to be ? I leave the question to the 
reader to answer. 

1 See the list of Catholic newspapers in the Annuaire du 
Clerge Frangaise (1904), p. 637. 



TO THE ENGLISH EDITION 43 

deafening uproar of a gang of crazy fanatics, 
Pius X. will be able to distinguish the voice 
of the real France — the France that thinks 
and works, and that would regard as an 
insult to the Pope the mere supposition that 
from his infallible lips could fall any words 
but words of peace. 

The French Parliament desired to make 
a law of liberty and independence. The fact 
that it has succeeded in doing so is proved by 
the calm and often enthusiastic reception given 
to the law by the Protestants 1 and the Jews. 
A revolt of Catholics against the law would 
lead to only one conclusion, namely, that the 
Church cannot be contented with the same 
treatment as other religious bodies, and that 

1 The new law comes much more hardly on the Protestants 
than on the Catholics, since the former have only a rudimentary 
organisation, and their adherents have not, like the Catholics, 
already acquired the habit of contributing to religious expenses 
in the form of fees. Among the Protestants there is nothing 
answering to the " honorarium for masses," and the position of 
the pastors is the more grave from the fact that they have 
generally large families. 

When Catholics say that the salaries paid by the State to 
the clergy are a national debt contracted by the expropriation 
of ecclesiastical property at the Revolution and to which the 
Protestants have no right, they forget the destruction of Pro- 
testant chapels and the confiscation of Protestant property that 
took place at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes* 



44 AUTHORS PREFACE 

she is incapable of accommodating herself ta 
a regime of liberty. 

If the Encyclical Vehementer nos is meant to 
be anything more than a declaration of theoreti- 
cal principles ; if it proves to be a statement 
of what the Apostolic See claims in practice, 
and is accompanied by an order for the 
mobilisation of the Catholic forces against 
a law passed in the regular way : then the 
people of Germany, of England and of the 
United States, of Holland and of Sweden, 
of every country where there is a Catholic 
minority, will be obliged to say to them- 
selves : " The moment that these men whom 
we have received as guests feel themselves 
strong enough, they will rebel against our 
laws. They will not strive against them as 
citizens who respect the social compact, and,, 
if they desire their due share of influence, 
desire only to use legitimate means to obtain 
it. No ; all means that they consider likely 
to win them a triumph will be legitimate in 
their eyes. To-morrow, perhaps this very 
night, the voice of the successor of Peter 
will be raised to promulgate against us the 



TO THE ENGLISH EDITION 45 

Encyclical Vehementer nos and to stir up our 
citizens against the laws of the country." 1 

But we may doubtless put aside such 
anticipations as these. My excuse for having 
mentioned them is to be found in the events 
of the month of February, during which we 
waited in vain for some one in authority to 
raise his voice to free the Church from the 
responsibility of any compromising connection 
with the parties of disorder. 2 In the early 

1 The very expressions used by Pius X. in his Encyclical 
recall those of Innocent III. in the Bull Etsi carissimus of 23rd 
August 121 5, in which he condemned and anathematised Magna 
Charta. Possibly Pius X. did not think of that precedent. 

2 [Since this was written, Mgr. Lacroix, Bishop of Tarentaise, 
has issued a pastoral which is one of the most courageous 
episcopal utterances that France has heard for a long time. 
Mgr. Lacroix says : 

" Our fault, our great fault — we must have the courage to say 
it— has been our failure, from the earliest days of the Republic^ 
to understand that we cannot with impunity put ourselves in 
opposition to the will of the nation. Our hesitations ; our 
criticisms — often entirely unjust ; our aspirations and our 
dreams of the restoration of a state of things in which, as we 
thought, the lot of the Church would have been happier 
because it would have been more protected ; finally, certain 
compromising alliances with the promoters of civil war : all 
these have been fatal to us, have covered us with unpopularity, 
and alienated from us the masses of the people. ... If we have 
the right to think, to say, to write, to print even that this or 
that policy seems to us dangerous, this or that law bad, this 
or that doctrine disastrous, that does not give us the right to 
attack individuals or to say that one person is a thief and 



46 AUTHOR'S PREFACE 

days of the disturbances various Parisian 
curts protested against the invasion of their 
churches by " parishioners " of whom they had 
no knowledge. The Abbe Gayraud, who is 
neither a socialist nor a heretic, considered it 
both his right and his duty to speak to his 
co-religionists in his twofold capacity of priest 
and deputy. " Respect God!" he wrote in 

another an assassin. One thing above all is interdict for 
every man of honour, namely, to pry into the private life of 
a public man, to misrepresent his most simple actions, to 
attribute to him the darkest designs, to impute to him 
imaginary crimes, and thus to seek by base attacks to discredit 
and ruin his authority. Let us who are Catholics be ever 
strangers to such shameful manoeuvres. Let us treat with 
deference and courtesy all who represent the State, from the 
first magistrate of the Republic, who represents the nation in the 
eyes of the world, treats with sovereigns, receives and is received 
by them, down to the humblest public officials who place so 
much disinterested zeal and intelligence at the service of the 
public. ... It is not fitting that we should resist by force the 
execution of laws that we consider bad. The celebrated words : 
4 Non ftossmnus ! ' — ' We must obey God rather than man,' and 
other similar sayings that are being rather abused just now, 
apply only to laws that directly violate the conscience. It 
is an exaggeration to extend their application to laws that are 
merely bad, I mean those that only injure our interests. In 
these cases, at whatever cost to our pride, the better course 
is to obey — first, because this course does not put us in revolt 
against our country, secondly, because it is the most in accord- 
ance with sound reason and also with Christian tradition." 

In conclusion Mgr. Lacroix says that, if they object to this 
or that law, they must strive for its repeal or amendment 
by constitutional means, and by the use of their rights as 
members of a democracy.] 



TO THE ENGLISH EDITION 47 

the Univers, and recalled the words of the 
Sermon on the Mount and the command of 
Jesus to Peter to put up his sword within its 
sheath. One bishop was found to repudiate 
him ; 1 not one to congratulate him. 

Since then the instinctive craving of 
Catholics for uniformity of opinion has had 
a powerful effect ; the most pacific cures in 
Paris, even the very men who censured 
rebellion most severely, have hailed from 
the pulpit the heroes of the revolt. At the 
present moment the majority of Catholics in 
their hearts and consciences deplore and dis- 
approve of these disturbances, but already 
they no longer dare to open their mouths. 
They are doing again what they did at the 
time of the Taxil enterprise and at the time 
of the Dreyfus affair; they are allowing 
themselves to be led by the violent faction. 
Is there not in such a spectacle as this some- 
thing to attract the attention of the friends 
of peace and to make them anxious ? 

In spite of all, I wish to hope that when 
the Pope speaks, it will not be to shut for 

1 Mgr. Dubillard, Bishop of Quimper. 



48 AUTHORS PREFACE 

ever the door that is still ajar. He has 
condemned the Separation Law, but that 
law permitted him on Sunday last, 25th 
February, to write one of the most important 
pages in the history of the Church. The 
consecration of fourteen French bishops in 
St Peter's is the consequence — the normal 
and foreseen consequence — of the independ- 
ence which Rome has recovered no less than 
the State. The Holy See will, no doubt, 
consider that, by taking so early and so large 
an advantage of the law, it has morally bound 
itself to accept its inconveniences at the same 
time as its advantages, and try to abide by 
it honestly. 



Chantegrillet, pres Crest (Drome), 
^rd March 1906. 



INTRODUCTION 

The attention of the whole of Europe has 
been drawn to the religious crisis through 
which France is at present passing. Europe 
is right. The effort that we are making in 
France has never before been attempted. It 
is a new experience, and it may be instructive 
in many regards to other nations. It would 
be a fundamental mistake to regard the 
separation of Church and State in France as 
a mere political measure arising from irritation. 
If, at the moment, certain politicians pride 
themselves on having brought it about of set 
purpose, it is only right to tell them that 
they are making a mistake in fact. Or rather 
it may be better to say nothing. What is 
the good of making the worthy gentlemen 
unhappy ? A small child of my acquaintance, 
just before he left the mountains last year, 
slipped away and put a few seeds in the 
ground. This year he showed us in triumph 
some tall firs, and believed, or pretended to 
believe, that they were his harvest. 

D 49 



50 INTRODUCTION 

Those who wish to pass for the authors of 
separation are the victims of an illusion similar 
to that of their opponents who persist in 
declaring that it was decreed by three or four 
Freemasons, emissaries of Satan. In truth, 
even the word Separation is quite inappropriate 
as a description of the present crisis : the 
rupture with Rome, the denunciation of the 
Concordat, the suppression of the budget des 
cultes ; all these are but remote consequences 
and external symbols. France stands at one 
of the most critical moments of her intellectual, 
moral and religious development ; it would no 
more be within her power to avoid it than 
it is within the power of an individual 
to escape the crisis of puberty. The whole 
nation feels this in a mysterious way. It is 
pulling itself together ; an instinct of which it 
is scarcely conscious warns it to be prepared. 
The question is asked here and there in the 
foreign press, why France has calmed down, 
why the volatile Frenchman has become so 
resolutely pacific. This is the true, the 
ultimate — one might almost say, the physio- 
logical — explanation. 

We must not then allow the expression 
" Separation of the Churches and the State " 
to mislead us and prevent us from recognising 
the gravity and complexity of the situation. 



INTRODUCTION 51 

If it were merely a question of the budget 
des cultes y France might perhaps have gone 
to America for a model. But in the United 
States the separation of the Churches and 
the State is but an empty phrase and a 
semblance of reality. No religion is State- 
paid because the astounding swarms of 
Churches and sects make it impossible to 
think of paying salaries to all the clergy ; 
they are therefore paid to none. It is just 
an acceptance of the situation, a merely 
empirical solution of a problem of which 
France is seeking a solution based on reason, 
logic and principle. It is a result of circum- 
stances, perhaps only provisional, for the 
question may be asked without absurdity 
whether the imperialist type of mind that is 
developing across the Atlantic will not 
eventually lead to the absorption by two 
or three Churches of the rest, and whether 
the day will not come when those two or 
three will open negotiations with the 
State to obtain the just recompense of the 
services that they render it. In other 
words, the American State establishes all 
the Churches and considers itself their 
debtor. 

In France the exact opposite is the case : 
the nation is in the act of notifying the 



52 INTRODUCTION 

Churches that it breaks with them definitively. 
The suppression of the budget des cultes is 
but a detail, an episode. We are not excit- 
ing ourselves over a question of pounds, 
shillings and pence. We are bidding fare- 
well to a past by which we have been 
formed. We are on the threshold of a 
religious revolution. 

Probably many readers will think that in 
the first part of the following essay, where 
I deal with the origins of the crisis, I have 
exaggerated the dark side. And perhaps 
they will think the second part, which 
deals with the results of the crisis and the 
evolution of Catholicism, overdrawn in an 
optimistic direction. If so, I ask them to 
be assured that I have tried to deal with the 
matter from a purely historical standpoint. 
I have put down simply and frankly what I 
see. 

One more remark by way of preface. The 
question in Parliament has been that of the 
separation of the Churches and the State. I 
shall speak here only of the separation of 
the Church — the Roman Catholic Church — 
and the State. If there had in fact been 
only Protestant Churches and Synagogues 
in France, the question of separation would 



INTRODUCTION 53 

not have come up so soon. The law which 
has just been passed affects all the religions 
connected with the State, but that is only 
a secondary consequence, due to the fact 
that Parliament could not discriminate or 
categorise : the primary cause of the law is 
to be found in the Roman Church, and it is 
that Church above all that it has in view. 

Protestantism, however, exists in France, 
and, although it is in a small minority, it is 
powerful and influential. But as a religion 
its influence is almost nil. It is misunder- 
stood because it is not known. Undoubtedly 
had France been Protestant, the present crisis 
would have been somewhat delayed ; but in 
time — in twenty, in fifty years — the same 
problem would have come up for solution, 
and it would have been solved in the same 
way. 

Circumstances have led Parliament to think 
almost entirely of the rupture with the Roman 
Church. Nevertheless this crisis is really a 
rupture with all the Churches, and as such 
is but the normal and necessary climax of 
the work of democratic laicisation. 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 

The first conclusion to which one is driven 
even by a mere glance at the history of France 
in the nineteenth century is that, if the State is 
now separating from the Church, the Church 
has for a long time past been giving it notice 
of separation. I am speaking, of course, of 
the clergy as a body. There have been 
exceptions ; but they have been rare enough 
to give one the right to say that, particularly 
i since 1870, the Church has been indefatigable 
in providing forces for the attack on the 
Republic. French Catholics have been, not 
merely conservative, but violently, desperately 
reactionary : always ready to march under 
no matter what flag — that of Boulanger or 
Drumont, or any other who would hold out 
to them the hope of speedily ridding the 
country of a detested regime. 1 When 

1 After 1870 the Republic showed more consideration for the 
Roman Church than had any other government. Instead of 
being grateful the majority of Catholics allowed themselves 
54 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 55 

priests meet and ask each other the news of 
their respective parishes, they do not say, 
'" How many families of practising Christians 
have you?" They say, "How many bien 
pensants electors have you ? " Now, the 
" right - thinking " elector is he who never 
thinks at all — if he can help it — or whose 
thoughts are thoughts of rage and hatred 
against the Republic. 

But it will be said : " This may have been 
true before the famous intervention of Leo XIII. 
in favour of the rallying of French Catholics 
to the Republic, but it is no longer true at 
the present moment." 

I reply that the instructions of the late Pope 
had no effect on the real mind of Catholics. 
Was Leo XIII. misrepresented, betrayed by 
the French clericals? It would take too long 
to discuss that question here. What is certain 

to be carried away by extremists of the type of the late 
Mgr. Freppel, and in 1873 tne country was honeycombed by 
polemical pilgrimages which marched to Paray-le-Monial to 
the war-cry of " Save Rome and France in the name of the 
Sacred Heart ! " 

("When we remember," says a Catholic writer — M. Chaine — 
"that from 1871 to 1875 the Catholics had in their hands every 
public office from the Presidency of the Republic down to the 
rural police force ; that the Army — always very churchy — and 
the officials of every grade were at their beck and call ; what 
egregious blunders must they not have committed to have been 
driven from power to a man, when circumstances had put it 
in their hands, and they filled every avenue to it?" 



56 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

is that his intervention had a result diametrically 
opposite to that which the Pope desired : it 
only widened the gulf between Catholicism 
and democracy. 

. The rallies imagined, indeed, with a naivete 
bordering on disingenuousness, that they had 
but to accept the Republic nominally, to hoist 
the tricolour and tolerate the Marseillaise, for 
the democracy to receive them with open arms 
and consider itself highly honoured in making 
them its leaders. But the democracy showed a 
prudent disposition ; it requested these un- 
expected friends to undergo an apprenticeship, 
a noviciate, to give proofs of their attachment 
— and lo! they were gone! It would be easy 
to-day to recognise the names of many of 
these Republicans of an hour among the 
promoters of the most disreputable or absurd 
enterprises against the Republic. 1 / 

1 The accredited apologists of the Church never weary of 
repeating that the liberty of a Catholic is unlimited in every- 
thing that has not been defined by the infallible magisterium, 
and in everything that does not concern faith or morals. But, 
in fact, these apologists themselves are the very first to act 
like people who have an almost diseased craving for sub- 
mission. Three years ago a society was founded, of which 
nearly all the members were priests. Rome, misinformed by 
jealous fanatics, requested the ecclesiastics to withdraw, and 
based its decision on the erroneous information that it had 
received. The priests retired. Not one of them ever thought 
of saying to Cardinal Rampolla : " Your condemnation is 
based on an error in fact." 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 57 

The good people who noisily advertise the 
soundness of their Catholicism no doubt possess 
11 supernatural virtues" much appreciated by 
their spiritual directors ; but in this venture, 
as in so many others, they showed a lack 
of intellectual and moral character which has 
made a profound impression on the nation. 1 

It is not, however, the fact that it is con- 
servative and reactionary that makes the 
clerical mind so antipathetic to the French 
democracy. Those qualities would be forgiven 
it if its reactionary ideas were the fruit of a 
profound, sincere and realised conviction. 
But, on the contrary, French clericals apply 
to politics the principle of authoritative faith 
to which they are accustomed in religion. 
They will to believe. They congratulate 
themselves on their blind faith and make a 
virtue of it ; and the moment always comes 
when they turn instinctively to Rome for 
the word of command. 2 Rome, like most 

1 On the attitude of French Catholics since 1870 the works 
of the Abbe Naudet and the Abbe Dabry should be read, 
particularly " Pourquoi les Catholiques ont perdu la Bataille," 
by the Abbe Naudet (Paris, 1904), and "Les Catholiques 
Republicans," by the Abbe Dabry (Paris, 1905). 

2 It is certainly not easy to paint a portrait of the French 
clerical. He is first and foremost a reactionary ; moreover, 
he is always on the road to or from Rome. But it is necessary 
to distinguish between the sincere clericals who really accept 
the directions of the Pope, and the sham clericals who amuse 



58 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

oracles, gives extremely obscure replies ; but, 
even if she always gave directly or indirectly 
the most effective advice possible, those who 
had consulted her would return from their real 
or ideal journey shorn of the capacity of 
citizenship. 

themselves by making fun of them. There were French 
clericals who prayed for the conversion of Leo XIII. and 
Cardinal Rampolla ! And 'even now some of their leaders 
never mention the predecessor of Pius X. except in a tone of 
utter contempt : " Poor Leo XIII. ! " See " Le Clerge Frangais 
et le Concordat," by the Baron de Mandat-Grancey (Paris, 
1905), pp. 26, 196, 206. On the contrary, the Baron is full of 
admiration for Pius X., and warns him that only four or five 
bishops have succeeded in retaining the respect of Catholics 
(p. 62). M. de Mandat-Grancey is scarcely more civil to the 
religious orders : " The generals and other heads of the 
religious orders are worse than the bishops. They have been 
able neither to foresee the storm, nor to make shift while it 
lasted, nor even to die with dignity." (Loc. cit. y p. 138). All 
this because bishops and generals of religious orders have not 
conducted with sufficient vigour the campaign against the 
Republic, which these pious people call in their jargon "La 
Gueuse" (the strumpet). I need not expatiate on the 
quarrels between the Catholics who were disobedient to the 
directions of Leo XIII. and the rallies. The two parties 
did their best to keep up appearances before the outside public 
to some extent, but from time to time the storm broke out. 
For example, a long article will be found in the Osservatore 
Romano (the official organ of the Holy See) for 24th February 
1901, in which the Verite Franqaise is pitilessly trounced. The 
papal organ criticises an article in the Verite Franqaise as a 
"tissue of gratuitous and malicious assertions, of statements 
which are in complete opposition to the glorious title inscribed 
at the head of its pages and are a mixture of perfidious 
insinuations and calumnies." The writer concludes by saying 
that the political defeat of the refractory Catholics is "the 
consequence of their blindness and obstinacy. ;J 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 59 

Here we reach the fundamental cause of the 
conflict between the State and the Church, a 
conflict which might have come to a crisis 
a few years earlier or later, but which no 
skill, no political measure, could long have 
averted. The citizen, as the modern French- 
man conceives him, is not the elector, not 
even the soldier ready to shed his blood for 
his country. Something deeper and more 
individual is required to make a citizen 
worthy of the name : namely, a manful 
personal effort to see clearly, to acquire a 
conviction, and, having acquired it, to act 
upon it. This effort may produce more or 
less happy results ; in some cases it will be 
carried to completion, in others it will not 
get beyond the stage of vision. But, whether 
fully realised or outlined merely, it is neverthe- 
less enough to transform an individual and 
make a new man of him. 

It is not, then, in France a case of two 
opposing parties, but of two antithetical con- 
ceptions of life. So fundamental a conflict no 
other country has yet known. Philosophers 
would perhaps say that the contending systems 
are those of transcendence and of immanence ; 
even a careless spectator would say that there 
is on the one side a nascent, on the other 
a moribund, civilisation. 



60 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

Here one must distinguish carefully between 
clericals and Catholics ; there is, it is true, a 
group of French Catholics who would not think 
of applying to authority in other than religious 
matters. We shall meet with them again later 
on and see what future is in store, as I believe, 
for this minority. But they are for the moment 
but an advance guard, and, since it is the actual 
situation that we have in view, it must be stated 
that in the eyes of the clerical the independent 
Catholic is a sort of monster, and in the eyes of 
the public at large Catholicism and clericalism 
are synonymous. 

This may perhaps seem surprising ; but the 
\J policy of Leo XIII., far from bringing about 
a reconciliation between the Church and the 
democracy, had quite an opposite result. It 
made their incompatibility more conspicuous. 
It is not my present concern to enquire into 
the Pope's intentions, but a strange fact must 
be noted : the noisiest organs of the clerical 
party agreed for the moment with the organs 
of militant anti-clericalism in declaring that 
the Pope, far from wishing to point Catholic- 
ism towards a new horizon, was making a 
manoeuvre to turn the flank of the Republic 
and conquer it. The public at large, which 
could not repair to Rome and ask the Pope 
what was at the back of his mind, was obliged 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 61 

to leave the interpretation of the pontifical 
directions to the Croix and the Vtriti 
Franpaise. 

But, suppose that these discussions had not 
taken place, that the insincerity of Rome had 
not been trumpeted abroad by the very people 
who claimed to have been entrusted with the 
transmission of her directions ; suppose, further, 
that not only had Leo XIII. desired a real, 
sincere and disinterested rally to the Republic, 
but also that his instructions had been entirely 
successful : nevertheless the effect produced 
on French public opinion could scarcely have 
been other than it was. The democracy is 
jealous. Patronising approval offends it quite 
as much as disapproval, for he who approves 
arrogates to himself rights over the democracy, 
and that is what it can never allow. 

There was a thrill of astonishment even 
in the most remote country places when in 
1893 the cur^s, who the year before had 4 
refused the keys of the church when it was 
desired to hoist a flag on the national fete of 
14th July, were seen not only tolerating the 
tricolour on the top of the church steeple, 
but even putting stacks of it rouncT the high 
altar and singing Mass for the Republic. 
This abrupt change of attitude went far to 
discredit the Church, for it brought into relief 



62 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

the incompatibility of the clerical idea of 
citizenship with the democratic idea. When, 
before the intervention of Leo XI II., the 
democracy attacked clericalism, it did so not 
because the latter had such and such ideas, 
but because its convictions were accepted on 
authority and not acquired by reason ; here 
was Leo XIII. giving the machinery for 
transmitting opinion a fresh start ! This time, 
it is true, the opinion transmitted by the 
machinery was of an agreeable character, 
but what of that? It is the machinery itself 
that the democracy will have none of. 

The efforts of Leo XIII., then, were quite 
unsuccessful. The majority of French citizens 
thought that, if he — the pontiff whose liberalism 
and intelligence were so much lauded — dictated 
to the faithful the lines of their political action, 
it must be because the Church could not help 
going outside the spiritual domain. Even 
though the Pope were prepared to bestow on 
us a perfect political system and a body of 
quite irreproachable functionaries, the French 
democracy would have none of them, because 
rightly or wrongly it wills to govern itself 
and live its own life. It does not ignore the 
difficulty and uncertainty of the enterprise, 
but this will has become with it an instinct 
which cannot be gainsaid. 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 63 

Will the democracy go back on itself and 
retrace its steps ? One might as well ask a 
young man who has just left home in the 
strength and pride of his twenty years whether 
he can ever again become an obedient little 
boy. 

This tendency of French clericals to be 
guided in their political action by ecclesiastical 
authority has not only had the result of isolat- 
ing them from the rest of the nation ; it has 
also put them under another disability almost 
equally serious. So accustomed are they to 
submission that they cannot understand a 
different attitude in others. The imperious 
need of civil autonomy that is felt by the 
Republican is to the clerical not merely a 
cause of astonishment and scandal ; it is 
impossible. It is a miracle ; and the believer 
in Lourdes and La Salette becomes in the 
presence of such a phenomenon an invincible 
unbeliever. You enter into conversation with 
him ; you put before him calmly your point of 
view ; suddenly he stops you abruptly : " Why 
is this your opinion ? " Then you do your 
best to put before him your arguments, to 
give him an account of the genesis of your 
intimate thought. It is lost labour, he does 
not listen to you ; but, if he is on terms of 



64 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

intimacy with you, he will seize you by both 
hands and cry out in a tone of affectionate 
reproach : " My dear fellow, don't try to 
humbug me ; I see that you have learned 
your lesson well, but for goodness' sake own 
up. We are better informed than you imagine. 
We know that the Lodges and Secret Lodges 
have their schemes." 

All your denials will be without the least 
effect. For him every one who is not a 
clerical belongs to some occult revolutionary 
sect in which lying is a duty. Your word 
has not the smallest weight with him. 

A mentality of this type breaks down all 
bridges and makes all conversation impossible 
with those who are afflicted with it. Here, 
in my opinion, is one of the deepest reasons 
of the present crisis, that which makes it at 
once important and novel. 

But, besides these factors, due to the 
intellectual evolution of the democracy now 
coming of age, there have been other causes 
which have precipitated events. 

In 1882, under the Jules Ferry ministry, 
France gave the Church a warning. Perhaps 
Catholics would have been wiser at that time 
if they had tried to understand the measures 
that so much excited them instead of arrang- 
ing ceremonies of expiation and seeing the 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 65 

miraculous intervention of God in the death 
of some police commissary or sheriffs officer 
obliged to put in force the law against the 
convents. On the contrary, the Congregations 
attributed the measures to a fit of temper, 
much as if a man should notice a sudden 
fall of the barometer and not even think of 
drawing any practical deduction from it. 
Expelled by the doors, the Congregations 
came back through the windows by crowds 
at a time ! They settled in swarms, bought 
houses and lands, started factories. Just at 
first there was some hesitation and some 
regard for appearances ; but in ten years the 
monks had forgotten everything : not only 
did they come and go with perfect freedom, 
but they assumed the bearing of conquerors 
and carried the flouting of public opinion to 
a point of affectation. 

The boldest in this respect were the 
Augustinian Fathers of the Assumption, or 
Assumptionists. The manifest boredom and 
indifference with which, about 1890, France 
regarded the stereotyped formulae of vulgar 
anti-clericalism, misled them. They fancied 
that the hour was come, that all things were 
both lawful and expedient for them. They 
treated France as a conquered country. 

Suddenly the country woke up to the fact 



66 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

that a miserable little rag, which had been 
published for years without attracting the 
least attention, and for which nobody felt 
anything but pity and disdain, was in process 
of acquiring one of the leading positions in 
the press so far as circulation was concerned. 
Even among the little provincial papers with 
a circulation of a few hundreds nothing had 
ever been known quite so empty and vulgar 
as the Croix. Its directors plainly set them- 
selves to find the level of the most limited 
and uneducated minds, not in order to raise 
them to a higher level, but in order to flatter 
them. It was not, however, this fact that 
brought about the immense success of the 
paper, but the hatred which overflowed in 
those columns headed by the figure of the 
Crucified of Calvary. 1 

A section of the French clergy saw the 
enormous moral injury that the Croix must 
inevitably do to Catholicism, but these clear- 
sighted men were in a minority. They dared 
not protest aloud, and, knowing that the 



1 The Assumptionists have not been alone in regarding 
spiteful derision as the best of weapons to use against their 
opponents. The much more moderate group, led by M. 
Jacques Piou, and known as the "Action Liberate Populaire? 
adopts the same method. It published an almanac for 1905, 
which was widely circulated, in which can be seen at a glance 
the ordinary tone of clerical polemic. 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 67 

Assumptionists did not forgive opponents, 
they groaned in silence. 

After a pretence of serving the secular 
clergy, the gentlemen of the Croix proceeded 
to tame them. They had grasped the immense 
profit that they could make out of the 
ecclesiastical system of the Concordat. They 
regarded the whole Catholic hierarchy — from 
the Bishop down to the humblest curate or 
choir-boy — as naturally designed to be their 
unpaid staff. Thus it came about that in 
every parish in France there were five or 
six people supplying the Croix with sub- 
scribers and news. These " zilateurs" and 
" ztlatrices" discharged their mission with 
marvellous success, as indeed was natural 
enough when one remembers that they all 
had a perfect knowledge of their surroundings. 
Past masters in the art of advertising, the 
Assumptionists succeeded in making it the 
first preoccupation of French Catholics — the 
religious w r ork par excellence — to secure a 
"good Press." Not only was there a Croix 
published in Paris, but every important district 
had also its localised edition. The tale was 
soon completed by the Croix Illustrde, the 
Croix du Dimanche, the Croix du Marin, the 
Noel or children's Croix, the Contemporains> 
the Croix des Comites, the Franc- Maconnerie 



68 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

Ddmasqude, the Questions Actuelles, the 
Laboureur, the Ligue de PAve Maria, the 
CEuvre Electorate, and I know not how many 
more. 1 Next, as it was necessary to isolate 

1 In order to form some idea of the effective and compact 
character of this organisation it is necessary to read the Croix 
des Comitis, in which the Assumptionists fomented the zeal 
of their correspondents, and organised the battle. It was 
issued with a supplement — Nos Conferences — in which the 
religious supplied their friends with model lectures on questions 
of the day, and formed their ideas. These lectures were a 
stroke of genius. It would not have been difficult almost 
anywhere, even in the most remote country places, to find 
men of the people who were greatly flattered that they had 
been thought of as lecturers. The little pamphlet was placed 
in their hands. They learned it by heart, and declaimed it 
with a gusto rare among professional lecturers ; thus they 
became, without perceiving it, marvellously efficient agents of 
the Assumptionists. Inevitably these well-meaning lecturers 
believed everything that they repeated in their harangues as 
absolutely as if it had been the outcome of personal enquiry 
or original opinion. Should they meet with a contradiction 
while they were repeating their lesson, they would have been 
incapable of understanding it, and could only begin over again 
with more vehemence than ever — which, with a popular 
audience, is the method most certain of success. It will be 
seen what a marvellous instrument for perverting people's 
minds the "Bonne Presse" became. The extent of the evil 
caused one intelligent priest to raise the alarm ; the Abbe 
Quievreux tried to divert the attention of Catholics to a duty 
incumbent upon all : the use of the intellect. His words were 
wasted on the desert air. Nothing could be more suggestive 
than the table of contents of Nos Conferences. The apparent 
diversity of the subjects thinly disguises the real aim, namely, 
the organisation of the Catholic party. It is a fraction of the 
nation claiming the past history of France as their own peculiar 
property, and attempting to create a notion of political 
orthodoxy which will enable them to ostracise their fellow- 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 69 

Catholics from the rest of France and preserve 
them from the impure contact of their fellow- 
countrymen, there was a whole crop of literary 
and even scientific publications. Finally, as 
wit and humour were not forbidden, there 
were even caricatures and puns — orthodox 
caricatures and canonical puns. 

Those of my readers who are interested in 
religious pathology should look through the 
series of the Pterin, the illustrated supple- 
ment of the Croix. They will then see with 
what lamentable imbecilities the Assumptionists 
flooded France in the belief that they were 
serving the cause of God, of His Christ and 
of the Church. 

Intoxicated with their success, they doubt- 
less saw in it the working of Providence, and 
redoubled their audacity. Yet a few months, 
they thought, and the victory will be won. 

citizens. The subjects most often dealt with are those of " The 
Action of the Freemasons," "The Protestant Conspiracy," 
"The Agricultural Syndicates," "Catholic Union," all inter- 
mingled with advertising lectures on the "Bonne Presse" 
France was deluged with halfpenny tracts. Here are some of 
their titles : " Manuel de Propagande de la Croix? " L'CEuvre 
surnaturelle— [sic] — de la Croix? "Croisade d'Honneur et de 
Patriotisme/' " L'Apostolat de la Presse." Those who have not 
much time, but would like to have a notice of the kind of ideas 
that these gentlemen of the Croix diffuse, should procure the 
"Almanach du Pelerin pour 1906," which has just been 
published (price 50 centimes) at the Bureaux de la Bonne 
Presse, 5 Rue Bayard, Paris, and is on sale at all Catholic 
booksellers. 



70 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

Then would they thrust down to Hell (!) all 
the instruments of the Devil — that is to say, 
the servants of democracy. 1 

For a long time France regarded the 
monastic conspirators with indifference border- 
ing on contempt. It was incredible that a 
handful of excited people should have a real 
and profound influence. The monks thought 
that lay France was vanquished and afraid. 
They therefore resolved to spread panic in 
its ranks. The worthy apostles of Nationalism 
and Anti-semitism, scenting a prey, began 
to go to Mass and became the faithful allies 
of the Assumptionists ; all sorts of curious 
associations began to spring up. Another 
France, so to speak, w^s being formed in 
the ranks of the Church, which could scarcely 
restrain itself from boasting of the reprisals 
and the vengeance of the day very near at 
hand, when it would be victorious. 

This new France provided itself with a 
new flag, the flag of the Sacred Heart, 
which might be seen floating behind the 
Crucifix on the front of the Croix, with 
these words of Christ to Blessed Margaret 
Mary Alacoque : 

" My Heart desires to be emblazoned on 

1 The devil, demons, and Satanism recur in almost all the 
Assumptionist publications. 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 71 

all the standards of France to make her 
victorious over all her enemies and triumphant 
over all the enemies of the Church/' 

There were among the clergy many men who 
saw the danger and were deeply revolted at 
the spectacle of the religion of Christ being 
used to cloak a crusade of hatred and civil 
war. But they were terrorised, and dared 
not speak. The most moderate Catholic 
newspapers, such as the Univers, fell into 
line and joined in the campaign of the Croix. 
Thirty-five bishops were found to congratulate 
M. Francis Veuillot on a work entitled " Le 
Drapeau du Sacre-Cceur." l 

1 'The flag demanded of France by the 
Sacred Heart" thenceforth made conquest 
after conquest. " Militia of the Sacred Heart" 
were founded, first at Nancy, then in a whole 
crowd of villages. Finally, on 13th January 
1 90 1, the commune of Auriac (Aveyron) was 
solemnly consecrated to the Sacred Heart by 
the Mayor, assisted by the whole Municipal 
Council. The name of this commune deserves 
to be mentioned, since it was the first to 
take this course. 2 

1 Published by Tolra, 28 Rue d'Assas, Paris. 

2 The minutes of the proceedings and deed of consecration 
were published in the Univers of 10th February 1901. We 
read: — "We, the members of the municipal council ... in 
meeting assembled unanimously express our great desire to 



72 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

The noisy way in which the Assumptionists 
already acted on the presumption of victory 
drew into their net big battalions of waverers. 
When they had won over the peasants in the 
Catholic districts, they made it their business 
to secure the trading classes. Notices were 
charitably sent to proprietors of cafes and 
hotels informing them that the Croix was the 
most widely read paper in France. During 
the next few days wealthy travellers happened 
to drop in, who persistently demanded the 
Croix, and sometimes refused to have a drink 
in places where the " bon journal' was not 
taken in. It takes a force of character rarely 
possessed by licensed victuallers to resist 
arguments of this nature. So they gave 
way, but stored up in their hearts a supply of 
deep-seated rancour against these organisers 
of a new inquisition. In many parts of the 
South the forgotten memories of 1815 and 
the " Terreur Blanche" began to be recalled. 1 

see the government of France accede to the demand of our 
Lord Jesus Christ by the official consecration of the nation to 
the Sacred Heart, and the representation of its image on the 
flag of France." Two years later the Univers said — and the 
remark caused no surprise to its readers : — "The image of the 
Sacred Heart imprinted in the midst of the French flag 
decidedly disturbs the sectaries. He (?) who inspires them 
already recognises there his conqueror (!)." 

1 The following are a few passages from the sermon which 
Pere Coube, S.J., trumpeted through France in September 
1900: 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 73 

Quartered in their church - shop, thinking of 
nothing but their conspiracy against the 
" modern monsters," the Assumptionists did 
not discern the signs of the times. 

Here we must pause for a moment and go 
back to about the year 1896. Since 1870 
the French democracy had steadily advanced 
in self-realisation. It had triumphed over 
every crisis, stamped out every poisonous 
growth. By the term "lay" it meant that 
it repudiated every sort of divine right in 
politics, and every consequence therefrom 
derived. The spirit of caste was repugnant 
to it ; in every respect it was progressing 

" Oh ! how splendid and how terrible it was, this lion-hearted 
people, when it stood up to Europe and threatened iniquity 
with its irresistible wrath ! How splendid it was, when its 
roar filled the Mussulman hordes with terror ; when it 
encamped before the Holy Sepulchre and said to Mahomet, 
* Come and take it ! ? when it stretched out its arm to the 
throne of the Popes and cried to the crowned knaves, ' Draw 
not near ' ; when it said to the Albigensian heretics, c Die ! ' 
and to the Protestants, ' Begone ! ? Yes ; it was splendid then, 
the French lion ! . . . Roar, then, O lion, roar in the luminous 
immensity of the void to tell the world that thou art weary of 
sleep ; that thou art about to descend into the plain to combat 
and to crush iniquity. Roar, O lion, to command the impious 
sects to vanish from the soil of France. Roar, to rally round 
thee all the soldiers of Christ and His Mother ; roar, that thy 
voice may top the eternal Mont Blanc, and tell to all the echoes 
that the reign of falsehood is over, and that the truth, too long 
obscured, is about to emerge from the mist and shine forth on 
the world." 



74 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

towards liberty and light, as much opposed 
to secret trials as to secret diplomacy. 

It is the will of the democracy that educa- 
tion shall be secular and compulsory, for it 
considers it as impossible that another should 
form our opinions for us as that he should 
eat and digest for us. It is the will of the 
democracy that every individual shall become 
a citizen, that is to say an active and intelligent 
member of the body politic ; and a citizen 
has no more right to renounce a single one 
of his duties or prerogatives than he has to 
emasculate himself. Our elder brothers, thirty 
years ago, had substitutes who for iooo or 
2000 francs undertook their military service 
for them. Hardly one generation has passed, 
and the very idea of this substitution seems 
to us a kind of monstrosity. 

This, briefly, is the direction in which the 
democracy is steering its course ; far from 
thinking that it has reached finality, it is 
persuaded that all that it has hitherto 
accomplished is but the prelude to the civilisa- 
tion of to - morrow. Its ideas are as yet 
vague, unshaped ; they have not yet per- 
meated our institutions ; but do not the facts 
of to-morrow spring from the ideas of to-day ? 

So, then, the democracy, heading this way, 
suddenly encountered on its course the organs 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 75 

of the "Bonne Presse" shouting and threaten- 
ing in the name of the Church and the 
Crucified: — "Thus far, and no further. The 
ideas of liberty that you preach are blasphemies 
against God. The ideal towards which you 
are aiming is a mirage, a device of Satan for 
your destruction." 

I am aware that the Church never officially 
authorised this newspaper to represent her ; 
but French Catholics as a body, by accepting 
the Croix as their organ, have identified its 
cause with their own, and the identification 
will last for a long time to come. I am also 
well aware that the Croix people made a 
wrong use of apostolic benedictions to make 
out that the Pope was more thoroughly on 
their side than was perhaps strictly the case. 
But the ecclesiastical hierarchy would never see 
that the famous paper was on the way to put 
the intelligence of Catholics to a terrible test, 
and to compromise the honour of the Church 
for a long time to come. They were unwilling 
to give scandal, and the consequence was 
that, in order to avoid scandalising the pious 
(whose faith, by the way, seems singularly 
robust), they scandalised the best minds of 
the nation. Neither Pope nor cardinals nor 
bishops ventured to speak so explicitly as to 
make any misunderstanding unpardonable. 



76 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

The democracy was, however, rather slow 
to be agitated by the bluster of the Croix 
and its satellites. It was persuaded, not 
without reason, that these people were making 
all this uproar in order to increase their own 
importance. It would have preferred to leave 
them unnoticed, not to allow them to divert 
it from pressing forward towards its goal 
But this serenity or disdain was misunderstood 
by the zealots of the clerical party. Thinking 
that their adversaries declined battle, they 
rushed to the assault on power. 

In time of war some belligerents, convinced 
that all means are lawful which lead to victory, 
forget the rights of others. So it was with 
the French clericals. Freemasonry seemed to 
them to be the citadel of democracy. They 
therefore turned upon it all their batteries. 

And so came about the interminable tangle 
of the most fantastic hoax that history has 
ever recorded. I should not think of recalling 
the business of L6o Taxil and Diana Vaughan, 
if those who were its guarantors and interested 
exploiters had loyally acknowledged their error, 
and tried to make reparation for it. But, on 
the contrary, they shared with L6o Taxil the 
profits of their partnership with him, and they 
mean to lose none of them even after his 
infamy has been blazed abroad. 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 77 

Perhaps some of my readers do not know 
who L6o Taxil was. He was a journalist, 
who was born in 1854, and about 1879 began 
to make a speciality of attacks on the clergy. 
His most famous work in this line was a 
book called " Les Amours Secretes de Pie 
IX." For a few years these disreputable 
publications, advertised as they were by 
sonorous condemnations, had a very great 
success ; but the anti-clerical public itself was 
soon sickened by the cynicism of their author. 

That sinister person was already branded 
by public scorn, and saw his customers desert- 
ing him, when in April 1885 his conversion 
was suddenly announced. The papal nuncio 
himself condescended to relieve him of the 
excommunication de lata sententia, and the 
Catholic papers vied with one another in 
extolling the miracle of grace. It was, how- 
ever, evident even to the most ingenuous 
observer that the conversion was nothing 
but an audacious imposture. The secular 
press told Catholics, with one voice, into 
what a trap they were walking. They would 
not listen, and Leo Taxil, with the help of 
a few accomplices, proceeded to adventure 
on the most obscene of speculations. 

For more than ten years Catholic France 
was deluged with publications in which, under 



78 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

the pretext of revealing the secrets of Free- 
masonry and unmasking the enemies of God, 
the confederates narrated the most outrageous 
absurdities that have ever been invented by 
a delirious imagination. In the large volumes, 
as in the periodical numbers feverishly looked 
for and greedily read in presbyteries and 
convents, pruriency ran riot. On every page 
the most obscene pornography was ostenta- 
tiously displayed for the greater glory of God. 
The basis of the " revelations " of Leo Taxil 
was that Freemasons practise a cultus of Satan. 
The Black Mass effects on their altars the 
real presence of the Devil, with this difference 
in favour of the Devil (!) that in the case of 
the diabolic Host, the appearance of the Host 
vanishes and the Devil manifests himself in 
person under the most unexpected and obscene 
forms. 1 

1 This chapter of contemporary history has not yet been 
written. A very brief but precise summary will be found in 
a pamphlet by Henry Charles Lea : — " Leo Taxil, Diana 
Vaughan et l'Eglise Romaine, Histoire d'une Mystification" 
(Paris : Societe de Librairie et d'Edition, 1901). Here are a 
few titles taken at random, which will give a sufficient indica- 
tion of the character of the Taxil literature: — "La Franc- 
Magonnerie Luciferienne," "Revelations completes sur le 
Palladisme, la Theurgie," " La Goetie et tout le Satanisme 
Moderne," " Magnetisme Occulte, Pseudo-spirites et Vocates 
Procedants," "Les Mediums Luciferiens," "La Cabale Fin-de- 
siecle," "Magie de la Rose-Croix," "Les Possessions a Petat 
Latent," "Les Precurseurs de TAnti-Christ"; "Recits d'un 
Temoin," by Dr Bataille, with numerous illustrations. Paris : 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 79 

The laughter and sarcasms with which 
Free thinkers received these outpourings of 
filth only confirmed the poor dupes in their 
credulity. Doubtless there were ecclesiastics 
who could see through it all. Are they to 
be congratulated? If they were not victims, 
then they were accomplices, and that is 
perhaps a less honourable role. For no 
authoritative voice was raised to save the 
honour of the Church and to separate her 
cause from this revolting apologetic. 1 

Delhomme & Briguet, 13 Rue de l'Abbaye (12 francs a volume) ; 
Leo Taxil, " Revelations completes sur la Francmaconnerie n : 
— The Masonic sisters, the Freemasonry of ladies and its 
mysteries, the secret ceremonies of the female lodges entirely 
divulged, female apprentices, female companions, mistresses, 
perfect mistresses, the "sublimes ecossaises," female knights 
of the dove, " Les fendeuses," nymphs of the rose, etc. 
Banquets, amusements, and hymns of the Masons. Paris : 
Letouzey & Ane, 51 Rue Bonaparte (price 3 francs 50). On 
page 400 I notice a whole-page advertisement of the "Life 
of our Lord Jesus Christ," by the Abbe C. Le Camus (now 
Bishop of La Rochelle). 

1 The provincial towns also had their anti-Masonic revela- 
tions. In 1895 Commander Dominique Margiotta published 
at Grenoble a startling volume on Palladism and the worship 
of Satan as Lucifer, prefaced by the apostolic benediction, and a 
long letter from Mgr. Fava, Bishop of the diocese, who addressed 
the chief performer as " Dear friend." There were other letters 
from Mgr. Piavi, Patriarch of Jerusalem, the late Archbishop of 
Aix, and a whole list of bishops. The disastrous fall of M. 
Taxil did not cause Mgr. Fava to lose his anti-Masonic faith. 
Eighteen months after that event he produced a book entitled 
" Le Secret de la Franc- Maconnerie," which volume won him 
an honour very rare in history. Pope Leo XIII. acknowledged 



80 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

The most moderate ecclesiastical journals 
had acquired the habit of devoting a column 
to " revelations." A steady stream of papal 
encyclicals and episcopal incitements made 
it an essential duty of Catholics to wage 
war against the " Sect of Satan." At last, 
in 1896, the Roman Anti-Masonic Com- 
mission (appointed by Leo XIII.) decided 
to organise a regular crusade against Free- 
masonry, and for that purpose to convene an 
international congress at Trent. The choice 
of this town was a symbol and a pro- 
gramme in itself. The sessions of this 
extraordinary congress were held at the end 
of September 1896, thirty-six bishops being 
present. They opened with an immense 

the gift of the work by a Latin poem of his own composition. 
The first few lines were as follows : — 

" Extulit ecce caput vesano incensa furore 
E stygiis inimica cohors erupta latebris, 
Divinum numen maiestatemque verendam 
Aggreditur : Christi sponsam mordere cruento 
Dente audet, premere insidiis atque arte maligna ; 
Praelia mox effrons certamina miscet aperto." 

— (l/m'vers, 7th June 1898). 

Lo ! bursting from its lurking-place in hell, 
The hostile band, inflamed with rage insane, 
Has reared its head aloft and would attack 
The Will and awful majesty of God : 
The Spouse of Christ with bloody tooth to rend 
It dares, and plies with wiles and art malign ; 
Soon shameless it will open battle join. 






THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 81 

procession in which 18,000 persons took 
part ; and L60 Taxil was the hero of the 
day. 

Happily four German priests were bold 
enough to demand precise information about 
Diana Vaughan, 1 the imaginary heroine of 
M. Taxil's most recent publications. That 
miserable individual at first brazened it out ; 
but, seeing that things were going to take 
an unpleasant turn, he abruptly left Trent 
and returned to Paris, 2 where a few months 

1 [This mythical lady, as her name suggests, was supposed to 
be an Englishwoman, and her " revelations " were largely con- 
cerned with Freemasonry in England and Scotland, which 
were represented as centres of the worship of Satan. In " Les 
Memoires d'une ex-palladiste, parfaite initiee, independante n 
(Paris : Pierret, 1895), and other works published by Leo Taxil 
in the name of Diana Vaughan, copious details are given of 
the British lodges, of which women are apparently members ! 
As a typical example of the incidents related by "Diana 
Vaughan " one may mention the story of a well-known English 
General, who was transported by the Devil from Gibraltar to 
Calcutta and back in a single night, in order that he might join 
in the Satanic rites of an Indian lodge.] 

2 Even after the Congress of Trent certain Catholic organs 
hesitated. On 12th November 1896 the Croix said : — 

"While awaiting the official enquiry on the subject of Diana 
Vaughan, which is proceeding before the Holy Office, we think 
it our duty to publish letters of official personages to which the 
Press (?) refuses hospitality." 

Then followed a letter to Diana Vaughan from the late 
Cardinal Parocchi (at that time the Pope's Cardinal- Vicar), 
authentic, but written before the Congress of Trent. 

The Univers, on the contrary, from about the middle of 
October began to beat a retreat, and tried to prepare Catholics 
for the great disenchantment. In an article published on 29th 

F 



82 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

later he announced that on 19th April 1897 
he would present Diana Vaughan in person 
to the public. On the appointed day he 
presented himself alone, and declared that for 
ten years he had been trying to find out 
exactly how far the unfathomable stupidity of 
Catholics would go. He just escaped being 
lynched by the meeting, and since then no 
more has been heard of him. 

After this lamentable and sickening campaign 
the victims of Leo Taxil might have been ex- 
pected to show some sense of shame. The 
bishops and priests who had thrown them- 
selves into the conflict were well aware that 
they had held the Freemasons up to odium, 
had represented them as monsters of lubricity, 
and had sown discord in families whose heads 
were members of the masonic organisation. 
An ordinary man, when he has committed 
errors of such a nature, regrets them and 

October 1896 Eugene Veuillot gave examples of the strange 
sentiments that his attempt excited in the readers of the paper. 
"You are too intelligent," said one subscriber, "not to see that 
you are playing into the hands of the Freemasons ... it is 
really carrying a joke too far ! " " Be assured," declared 
another, "that the doubts to which you give credit are being 
cleverly disseminated by Palladists and Luciferians, who feign 
conversion in order to betray us ! " " To speak against Diana 
Vaughan," wrote a third, "is to try to prevent the canonisation 
of Joan d 5 Arc (!)." 

When one reflects that the Univers has the most intellectual 
public of all the Catholic daily papers, one can form some idea 
of the mental capacity of the subscribers to the other sheets. 






THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 83 

tries to make reparation. Not so the men 
of the Church. Many of them were furious 
at having been hoaxed ; not one even thought 
of apologising to those whom he had treated 
as the off-scouring of the universe and the 
incarnation of evil. On the contrary, they 
said with one voice: "The Freemasons paid 
Leo Taxil to deceive Catholics. ,,1 

It was useless to point out that all the 
organs of free thought had warned Catholics 
into what a trap they were falling ; that Leo 
Taxil had been expelled from the masonic order 
during his apprenticeship. Nothing made any 
difference. For these people the old formula 

1 If I am not mistaken, it is to M. Gaston Mery, colleague of 
M. Drumont on the Libre Parole, that the honour of having 
invested this tactic must be assigned. In January 1900 he 
published a pamphlet in which he related with relish the 
impostures of M. Taxil and their success, but he bravely 
entitled it " Un Complot Magonnique : la Verite sur Diana 
Vaughan" (Paris : Libriarie Bleriot, 80 pp., 8vo). The business 
was characterised by a bland ingenuousness. They cursed 
Leo Taxil and his accomplices, but they sublet the shops where 
the Catholic believers had been so copiously bled : and on the 
scarlet cover of M. Mdry's pamphlet were advertisements of 
works on " The Demon," by a priest of the diocese of Paris ; 
"White Magic," by "Magus," etc. 

From 15th January 1897 the same Gaston Mery undertook 
for the Libriarie Antisemite the editorship of a fortnightly 
review — U Echo du Merveilleux, evidently intended to rally 
M. Taxil's public, and provide it with the pabulum that had 
become indispensable to it. In the first number, the place of 
" Palladist " revelations was taken by a long account of some 
apparitions of the Virgin at Tilly-sur-Seulles, of which M. 
Gaston Mery was a witness at Christmas, 1896. 



84 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

of the Middle Ages still holds good : "No 
faith with heretics." 

It will perhaps be thought that the anti- 
clerical party took advantage of Leo Taxil to 
ridicule the Church. A little ; but much less 
than might have been expected. The moment 
the first banter was over, the incident was 
forgotten ; even controversialists were ashamed 
to pursue people so lamentably credulous. 1 In 
spite of all, the democracy was in 1896 ready 
once more to hold out the olive branch to the 
.Church. 2 

1 A society cannot with impunity live on the revelations of 
M. Taxil, or go for healing to such physicians as MM. Gaston 
Mery and Georges Bois, or Mgr. Fava. Neurosis and mental 
derangement became epidemic among Catholics. The shop- 
windows of the approaches to Saint-Sulpice were filled with 
works of prophecy of the most improbable description. I have 
one before me. It is entitled: " Le grand coup, avec sa date 
probable, cest-a-dire le grand chatiment du monde et le 
triomphe universel de l'Eglise. Etude sur le secret de La 
Salette compare' aux prophecies de PEcriture et a d'autres 
prophecies authentiques." (The great event, with its probable 
date, that is to say, the great chastisement of the world and 
universal triumph of the Church. Study of the secret of La 
Salette compared with the prophecies of Scripture and other 
authentic prophecies), by the Abbe* Em. Combes, curd of 
Dion (Allier), 3rd edition, 126 pp., 8vo. "His Holiness 
Leo XIII. has accepted the dedication of this third edition." 

It was, no doubt, of such notions as these that M. Fonsegrive 
was thinking, when he wrote (Quinzaine, 1st November 1901) : 
" Let us rid ourselves of monsters and chimeras, and cease to 
fight against windmills." 

2 These pacific dispositions were gathered up and solemnly 
expressed by Spuller in the Chamber of Deputies on 10th 
March 1894, in his famous speech on the "New Spirit." 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 85 

It was then that the Dreyfus affair broke 
out. I am not going to tell that story again, 
even briefly. It will be enough to recall a 
few precise facts. I am quite convinced that 
no word of command was given either from 
Rome or elsewhere ; but the Catholic forces 
are so much accustomed to manoeuvre as one 
man that everything happened just as if there 
had been a word of command. With a 
marvellous solidarity all the Catholic papers 
insinuated not merely that all the partisans 
of Dreyfus were his accomplices, but that 
every individual who, without any opinion on 
the question of guilt or innocence, demanded 
the revision of the case and a public trial, 
was paid by a syndicate of treason. 

Never was the instinctive unity of Catholic 
opinion so forcibly displayed as during those 
terrible days when we lived in an atmosphere 
of civil war. In 1870 the dogma of infallibility 
had furious partisans and a glorious minority 
of opponents; in 1896 the dogma of the 
necessary guilt of Dreyfus made, so to speak, 
no heretics. There were, indeed, a few priests 
who said courageously and simply that they 
were not convinced, that they felt doubts and 
hesitations, that in any case the guilt of this 
Jew ought not to be made an article of faith. 
The outcry and the indescribable persecutions 



86 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

with which these reservations were received 
only made it plain to the eyes of all that, 
though the civil and political independence of 
the Catholic believer may be safeguarded in 
the works of the Fathers or in some papal 
encyclical, in practice it is a myth. 1 

When the "Affair" broke out, the clerical 
press had its course marked out from day 
to day. It had thus a great advantage over 
the lay press which hesitated in its attempt to 
arrive at an opinion, even if it did not tack. 
But the very victory of the clericals ruined 
them. 2 

When at the sitting of 7th July 1898 
the Chamber of Deputies unanimously voted 
the placarding of the speech of the late 
M. Cavaignac, this very unanimity was the 
sign of an abnormal influence — of a vote, 
tumultuous like those of popular assemblies, 
or mystical like those of the councils. On 

1 [See the recent declaration of Mgr. Turinaz, Bishop of 
Nancy, page 118, footnote. A very few Catholic laymen, to 
their great honour, braved obloquy and social ostracism in 
defence of justice, like Emile Zola and so many free thinkers. 
In particular one should mention the name of the distinguished 
professor of the Ecole de Droit and member of the Institute M. 
Paul Viollet, who founded the Cornite catholique pour la defense 
du droit to support the demand for the revision of the Dreyfus 
case.] 

% See the admirable book of M. Le'on Chaine, one of the 
Catholics of the minority : " Les Catholiques Frangais et leurs 
difficultes actuelles" (Paris, 7th edition, 1904). 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 87 

the morrow of that famous vote the course 
of events was terribly precipitated. On 30th 
August Colonel Henry confessed that he was 
the author of the document for the authenticity 
of which the Minister of War had vouched a 
few days before. From that moment numbers 
of deputies and innumerable electors asked 
themselves : " How came it that we were so 
blinded? What occult power has misled 
public opinion and overborne us without our 
knowledge, transforming the representatives of 
the nation into a panic-stricken herd ? " 

To all these questions there was only one 
reply : clericalism was the chief culprit. 
Clericalism, by making use of the network 
of religious influences and by the cleverness 
of its tactics, had outraged the conscience of 
France and had succeeded by indirect means 
in perverting the judgment, not only of its 
adherents, but also of citizens indifferent or 
even hostile to the Church. 

When calm was to some extent restored, and 
clericalism, in spite of its desperate efforts and 
shameful alliances, had lost one battle after 
another in a war from which it expected to 
emerge triumphant, the whole of republican 
France made an examination of conscience, 
and asked itself how it had come to lose all 
at once every vestige of judgment, and 



88 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

whence came this wave of madness in which 
for long months it had been engulfed. 

There was the culprit, still braggart and 
threatening, and, far from hiding his head in 
shame, prepared to continue his work. 1 In 

1 On 25th April 1901 the famous Jesuit, Pere Coube, 
delivered at Lourdes, to a congregation of 60,000 men, his 
celebrated oration on "The Electoral Sword," in which he 
naturally recalled the memory of Joan d'Arc, and gave to 
the Virgin Mary a title under which she had never before 
been invoked — " The Warrior Virgin I " ..." To battle," he 
cried in conclusion, " under the standard of the Sacred Heart ! 
A standard is not a sign of peace, but a sign of war." 

Even Pere Didon, the celebrated Dominican, went over, 
alas ! to the big battalions. On the 19th July 1898, before 
General Jamont, Commander-in-Chief of the French army, who 
attended in state, he preached a sermon on the " Military 
Spirit," which made a tremendous sensation. His biographer, 
Pere Stanislaus Reynaud (" Le Pere Didon," Paris, 1904, 
p. 377), states that the sermon expressed an "ardent militarism," 
but adds that the charges made against Pere Didon on this 
occasion were false. Pere Reynaud would have done better 
to give us simply the actual words spoken by the preacher. 
Every one would then have been able to form his own opinion. 
Fortunately, I can supply the omission by the following quota- 
tion, taken from the Bulletin de F Union pour F Action Morale 
of August 1898, page 397 : — 

11 Of a truth, when persuasion has failed; when love has 
proved impotent, it is necessary to resort to force and coercion 
— to wield the sword, to strike terror, to chastise, to smite : 
justice must be thrust upon men. The use of force in these 
circumstances is not merely lawful and legitimate, it is of 
obligation ; and force thus used ceases to be a brutal faculty 
and becomes a holy and kindly energy. 

"The supreme art of government is to know the precise 
moment at which toleration becomes complicity. Woe to 
those who hide their criminal weakness behind a futile mask 
of legality ; to those who let their swords rust ; to those whose 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 89 

1896 the celebrated cry of Gambetta, " Le 
cUricalisme, voila rennemi ! " had almost been 
forgotten. In 1898 it was obtruded with 
greater force than ever on the memory and 
the reflections of the democracy. For the 
democracy had just experienced to its stupe- 
faction what formidable crises may be let 
loose on a country by an apparently negligible 
minority, provided it is audacious, thoroughly 
disciplined, and appeals to religious convictions. 
The result was a profound movement among 
the intellectual and political dlite of France. 
Numbers of men, who were perfectly indifferent 
to religious controversies and had had till then 
no more sympathy with anti-clericalism than 
with clericalism, shook off their indifference. 
The Church all at once appeared to them as 
the moving spirit of reaction, as a crafty and 
hypocritical power which, under colour of 

kindness of heart turns to weak indulgence. The fatherland, 
delivered over to every tribulation, will reject them in disgrace, 
because they knew not how to defend and save her, even at 
the price of blood." 

Thus Pere Didon, in the intoxication of his verbosity, 
announced to lay France what was the ideal of Catholic 
France. Perfectly well aware of the invincible repugnance 
felt by the nation for the Catholicism of the Jesuits and the 
Assumptionists, he sounded a trumpet blast to rally round 
the standard of Catholic France the military and financial 
bourgeoisie. The reception given to this flood of genuine 
eloquence showed that the French democracy is not disposed 
to allow itself to be drawn after a certain species of imperialism. 



90 DISESTABLISHMENT IN PRANCE 

showing the simple the way to heaven, 
marshals them in order to hurl them suddenly 
into the midst of the political fray. 

In all that I have said hitherto I have 
spoken of the Church and of clericalism almost 
as if those two words w r ere synonyms. I 
know well that they are not ; but, speaking 
as a historian who deals with facts, I am 
compelled to say that for all practical purposes 
the French citizen of to-day cannot help con- 
founding the Church with clericalism. Since 
clericalism has become the liege of the Church, 
and the Church has accepted its homage, the 
defeats of clericalism, which grow daily more 
terrible, have become defeats of the Church, 
and all the territory conquered by democracy 
seems to have been wrested from the Church. 

On those who have been good enough to 
follow me so far the conviction must have 
forced itself that the separation of Church 
and State was already accomplished. The 
French Parliament, in voting it, did but 
register an existing fact, and seek a modus 
vivendi corresponding to it. 1 Hence the calm 

1 The first Bills introduced into the Chamber of Deputies 
were conceived in a very different spirit. They were the work 
of a minority who would have liked to make the law an 
instrument for the elimination of Catholicism in France. How 
is it that from those primitive proposals we have gone on to a 
law which, if it is loyally accepted and observed, will secure a 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 91 

and pacific turn that this great discussion has 
taken. If Parliament had been ahead of 
public opinion, it would have been excited 
and agitated ; but, on the contrary, it has 
simply followed with quiet attention debates 
in which the question at issue was one of 
the most grave that the French conscience 
has had to solve since 1789. 

The separation of Church and State, under- 
stood as Parliament has understood it, is more 

religious liberty such as France has never known, and an 
independence of the Churches in regard to the State such as 
exists in no other country ? It is simply by the efforts of men 
of goodwill who, instead of denouncing the authors of the 
earliest proposals as tyrants, thieves and assassins, discussed 
the question calmly and steadily, like citizens who respect the 
convictions of others. The success of these efforts reflects the 
greatest possible credit on the parliamentary regime. The 
parliamentary commission on the law gave audience to every 
individual and corporate body that applied to be heard. In 
this way Protestant deputations were able to suggest notable 
improvements. It is quite evident that Catholic deputations 
might have obtained much more, had those on that side con- 
descended to intervene in the drafting of the law by the 
commission. One man who, though neither a deputy nor 
a senator, has played one of the most effective parts in the 
making of the new law is M. Raoul Allier, Professor in the 
University of Paris. The articles that he contributed every 
week to the Steele very soon attracted the notice of Parliament 
by their wisdom, their moderation, their sincerity, and the 
extraordinary knowledge of religious matters that they dis- 
played. They have been collected in two volumes : I. " La 
Separation des £glises et de l'Etat" (i8mo. xxiv. and 576 
pages, 6f.) ; II. "La Separation au Senat" (i8mo. 294 pages, 
4f.). Both published by the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 8 Rue 
de la Sorbonne, Paris, V. 



92 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

than a change of dynasty or of the form of 
government : it is the close of a historical 
epoch, and the setting of our face towards 
new horizons. 

This is not the place to speak of the recep- 
tion that France has given to the Separation 
Law. Many people are astonished that the 
democracy has received the passing of the law 
without noisy demonstrations of enthusiasm. 
But this tranquillity is accounted for quite 
naturally, if what has already been said is 
taken into account : never has a law been 
voted under more normal conditions. Distant 
or casual observers, seeing that the democracy 
has arrived at a point which they did not 
suspect it would reach, have had the notion 
of a victory neither looked for nor hoped for ; 
but those who have followed the evolution of 
the democracy cannot be victims of such an 
illusion. 

In the clerical camp nobody seems to have 
thought of quietly and objectively studying 
the law, or enquiring into its origin and 
import. With the mentality of a naughty 
schoolboy, some have uttered howls of agony 
and shrieked: "It is unjust; it is a perse- 
cuting law!" The others have shrugged 
their shoulders, and said with a forced smile : 
4 'Your law is a failure, a capitulation! After 



THE ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS 93 

having threatened us, you are afraid of us." 1 
Howls and smiles are equally devoid of 
sincerity and seriousness. 2 

1 See for example, an article entitled, "La Mort de la 
Separation," by M. Albert de Mun, of the Academie Francaise, 
in the Figaro of 3rd July 1905. 

2 This remark is severe, but, on consideration, I regret to 
be unable to withdraw it. Since these words were written, 
the most conspicuous leaders of the clerical party have, as it 
were, made it their business to prove their accuracy. The very 
first to do so is M. de Mun, who, forgetting his written words 
of six months ago, which I have just quoted, in regard to the 
Separation Law which has not been modified since then in any 
way, has again taken up his pen, and, in an article entitled 
" Consummatum est," declares that a " great crime " has just 
been committed which will have " incalculable consequences," 
(Croix, 8th December 1905). It is only a change of tactics, it 
will be said with perfect accuracy ; but this very word M tactics" 
characterises the constant attitude of the clerical party. That 
party never even thinks of trying to influence the political 
evolution of the country ; its attitude towards that evolution 
is sometimes that of a spectator, sometimes that of an enemy, 
always hypnotised by its dream of power. 

M. de Mun and his friends have no more thought of studying 
the Separation Law from the religious point of view than from 
that of the political evolution of France. They have had only 
one concern — whether and how they can make the law an 
occasion for overturning, or, at least, controlling, the Republic. 
Hence their lack of any consistent line of conduct, hence their 
exhibition of a sometimes grotesque incoherence. Six months 
ago they thought it a clever policy to taunt those whom they 
regarded as the responsible authors of separation ; now they 
think it clever to curse them, because they hope to work up an 
agitation in favour of a change of regime. This is the reason 
why, at the moment when almost the whole French people and 
the whole of Europe with them were engaged in paying tributes 
of respect to the citizen who, having risen from the position of 
Municipal Councillor in an obscure commune of the Dauphine' 
to that of President of the Republic, was about to return to the 



94 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

The law is not perfect — nothing is in this 
world — but it has been possible to say with 
good reason that "the debates have been 
very thorough, very thoughtful ; that all the 
extremely delicate problems that came up 
for solution were considered with the utmost 
care by our deputies ; that the majority 
allowed the minority not merely to speak 
as much as they wanted, but also to co- 
operate in the work which thus becomes 
common to all parties." 1 

rank of a private citizen, men who claim to be pupils in the 
great school of reverence were insulting his honoured old age. 
On the 17th of December 1905 M. Jacques Piou, in a speech 
to the Action Liberate {?) Populaire^ said : — 

"M. Loubet is another Pilate, signing sentences of death 
and washing his hands of them. His part has been to show 
himself off and to sign his name. His seven years of office 
are summed up in three words — proscription, spoliation, 
persecution." 

1 Pastor L. Lafon in the Vie Nouvelle of 8th July 1905. 



II 

THE POSITION OF THE CLERGY IN FRANCE 

The long details already given will allow 
me to be comparatively brief in the present 
chapter : the position of the clergy is the 
result of what has gone before. I have 
pointed out some of the disastrous blunders 
of clericalism ; but when the democracy tries 
to avoid confounding clericalism with the 
Church, and directs its glance to purely 
religious matters, it is scarcely less surprised. 1 
Let us consider a few facts. Two years 
ago Mgr. Le Nordez, Bishop of Dijon, and 
Mgr. Geay, Bishop of Laval, were accused 
of abominable offences. Against the former 
was brought the gravest accusation that could 
be brought against a man invested with the 
sacerdotal character, an accusation graver 

1 The book most widely read in Catholic circles just now is 
that of the Rev. Father Jouet : M Un petit tour par le purgatoire 
chaquejour en compagnie du Sacre Cceur de Je'sus" (a little 
daily trip round Purgatory in the company of the Sacred Heart 
of Jesus). It has gone through more than a hundred editions. 

95 



96 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

even than that of apostasy — the accusation 
of treason ; and a treason, I believe, of a 
kind not hitherto recorded in ecclesiastical 
history. Mgr. Le Nordez was said to be a 
Freemason ! 

The crime of Mgr. Geay was one more 
severely regarded by natural morality, but 
less so by the "supernatural" morality of 
the Roman congregations ; it was only one 
more dossier to be filed with many others in 
the archives of the Holy Office. Mgr. Geay, 
according to his accusers, had violated the 
Abbess of the Carmelite nuns at Laval, and 
had lived with her on terms of the closest 
intimacy. 

At Dijon, at Laval, in the whole of Catholic 
France, the scandal was immense. The two 
bishops met their accusers with indignant 
denials. They were insulted in their own 
cathedrals by their own priests. 

I pass over the details. The public 
conscience gave a sigh of relief when it 
was announced that the Pope had summoned 
the two bishops, and that their case was 
going to be tried by the ecclesiastical tribunals. 
Many men among those who are quite remote 
from the affairs of the Church had deplored 
these scandals. Happily every one has not 
yet the mentality of certain cannibals of the 



POSITION OF THE CLERGY IN FRANCE 97 

press. The ferocious joy with which certain 
journalists exploited the Dijon and Laval 
affairs was painful. 

So, when the sovereign Pontiff had summoned 
the bishops to Rome, we began to hope that 
'signal justice would be done ; that, if the 
accused were guilty, the Church in the person 
of its head would vomit them from its mouth 
in righteous indignation ; that, if they were 
innocent, Mother Church, thrilling with an 
unspeakable joy, would proclaim to the whole 
world the innocence of the elders of her 
people, and taking by the hand the victims 
of infamous intrigues would restore them in 
triumph to their episcopal chairs. 

We waited expectantly. 

A few weeks later it was announced by 
paragraphs in the Catholic papers, as confused 
as they were brief, that Mgr. Geay had 
handed to the Holy Father his resignation 
of the bishopric of Laval. A few days later 
still we learned that Mgr. Le Nordez had 
retired from the See of Dijon. The two 
bishops remained bishops without dioceses. 

The effect of the news on many a Free 
thinker and on multitudes of Catholics was 
stupefying. "The bishops must be guilty/' it 
was said, " since Rome has not allowed them 
to return to their dioceses. But, if they are 

G 



98 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

guilty, how comes it that the Church, severe 
and implacable as she is towards dogmatic 
errors, has no signal punishment for these 
men who, from the fact that they are bishops, 
are doubly guilty ?" 

What passed in that tribunal of the Holy 
Office whose prefect is the vicar of Jesus 
Christ? Perhaps we shall never know. The 
lay conscience awaited a clear decision, a 
conclusive judgment. The lay conscience 
was mistaken. These bishops have relatives, 
friends : perhaps one or the other has an 
aged mother. The poor old woman, when 
she sees him celebrate and hears him whisper 
in the silence of the sanctuary the words which 
bring God into the Host, will quiver with 
anguish at the thought of those impure 
accusations ! 

I offer the unhappy bishops my sincere 
commiserations. If they are innocent, the 
atmosphere of misery and suspicion that 
surrounds them is the most frightful torture 
to which a man could be subjected. What 
pen can describe the misery with which 
their souls must be overwhelmed? " They 
gave me gall to eat, and when I was thirsty 
they gave me vinegar to drink." 

If they are guilty, they are still to be pitied 
for not having been rigorously punished ; for 



POSITION OF THE CLERGY IN FRANCE 99 

in the severity of the punishment they might 
perhaps have gradually found restoration and 
redemption. They would have felt admira- 
tion for the chastening hand growing up in 
their hearts. They would, in a way, have 
taken pleasure in their punishment, and how- 
ever bitter it had been, it would perhaps have 
been less odious than the degradation to 
which they are actually reduced. 

I have lingered to some extent over the 
affairs of Dijon and Laval, because, if they 
were little remarked by the public at large, 
they had an enormous effect on the consciences 
of certain French Catholics who severely con- 
demned the proceedings of the Holy Office. 
More than one bishop asked himself in anguish 
what would become of his honour on the 
day when it pleased a group of fanatics to 
concoct some infamous plot against him. The 
bishops do not believe in the infallibility of 
the French tribunals, but they would have no 
fear of appearing before a secular court of 
justice, while they resolve that in no circum- 
stances will they allow themselves to be 
dragged before the Holy Office. 

And below the bishops, numbers of simple 
priests who, in the humble position which 
they occupy, are not exposed to such dramatic 
dangers, were nevertheless grieved, astonished, 

LOFC. 



100 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

scandalised, to see the tribunals of the Holy- 
See at the dawn of the twentieth century 
apparently choosing as a model those of the 
Sublime Porte. 

Let us come back again to the intellectual 
and moral standard of the French episcopate 
at the present moment. In recent years it 
has been the fashion to judge them very 
severely and to declare them very inferior to 
the episcopate of the Second Empire or the 
Restoration. 1 Is it not possible that there 
is some optical illusion in these judgments ? 
The question seems to me too delicate and 
complex to make a categorical and reasoned 
opinion possible. Ones general impression is 
that talent, knowledge, virtue, devotedness are 
met with as frequently among the bishops as 
in the teaching profession or the magistrature, 
without any striking difference in favour of the 
Church. All bishops are saintly bishops — by 
definition ; just as all prefects are devoted 
prefects — by definition. The first thing that 
strikes one in the French episcopate is its 
conservative attitude. Their lordships are 
addressed in obsolete styles by which they 
are visibly not displeased. They attach to 
customs, to precedence, to the Protocol an 

1 See for example, the book by Baron E. de Mandat- 
Grancey already quoted (p. 58). 



POSITION OF THE CLERGY IN FRANCE 101 

importance that seems singular to ordinary 
mortals, but it would be unjust to attribute 
all these weaknesses to their religious training. 
Bishops are functionaries, and by that fact 
are exposed to a number of maladies which 
rage in all administrations. There is a saying 
of Mgr. Rumeau, Bishop of Angers, which 
deserves to be preserved, as an expression 
not so much of the episcopal mentality as 
of the "inerrancy " which nearly all our 
functionaries are good enough to attribute to 
themselves :—" A bishop does not discuss, 
he does not refute, he condemns ! ' Are 
there not prefects and school inspectors who 
have used similar words ? 

What is certain is that our bishops have 
the air of believing themselves something 
more than human. Like Jesus Christ, they 
speak a great deal, but unlike Jesus Christ, 
who spoke in short parables, they speak in 
long pastorals. These quasi-liturgical docu- 
ments are read at High Mass — that which 
the fewest people attend — in a melancholy 
tone {in tono epistolce). The pious ladies, 
well aware that they will gain no indulgence 
by listening to this recitation, avail themselves 
of the time to tell several decades of --their 
beads and utter a heap of ejaculatory prayers 
enriched by signal privileges i>ro vivis et 



102 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

defunctis. In the majority of French dioceses 
there is no contact between the bishop and 
his flock beyond the annual reading of the 
Lenten pastoral. And the idea of wanting 
anything further never enters the heads of 
either. 

The relations between the bishop and the 
faithful of his diocese are not, then, appreciably 
different from the relations between a prefect 
and the inhabitants of his department. The 
one has his circuits for confirmations, the other 
for the conseil de revision ; * the one speaks 
in the name of the Pope, the other in the 
name of the Government ; but both speak 
in the empty and grandiloquent style that 
is prescribed in such circumstances. A few 
years ago there was an exception ; a young, 
ardent and zealous bishop tried to speak not 
over the heads of his audience, but to them. 
It was down by the frontier in a part of the 
country where unbelief has not yet penetrated. 
The bishop expressed his joy at the regularity 
with which they performed all their obliga- 
tions as Christians : at the attendance at Mass, 
the frequent communions, the flourishing pious 
societies ; but he added, quite unexpectedly, 

1 [A military commission presided over by the Prefect, which 
sits every year in the principal towns of the department to draw 
up the list of young men qualified for military service.] 



POSITION OF THE CLERGY IN FRANCE 108 

that all this, excellent as it was, was only a 
beginning ; that the Christian ought to be 
distinguished from worldly society by his 
virtues : among others, by his horror of lying, 
fraud and deceit in any form whatsoever. He 
descended to precise details, and declared that 
theft committed to the prejudice of the State 
by smugglers was no less reprehensible than 
ordinary theft. 

There was a tremendous scandal. In a few 
days all clerical France learned that there was 
a bishop somewhere who preached against the 
11 supernatural virtues " and invited his flock 
to turn up their noses at the Mass and the 
Confessional. Far and near the pious crossed 
themselves mournfully, and said to themselves 
that the appearance of such a bishop was 
doubtless the prelude to that of Antichrist. 

It will be seen that this exception proves 
the rule. Almost wholly out of touch with 
the people the bishops seem to live in a land 
of dreams. I will not stop to speak of certain 
declarations of war against democracy which 
outraged public opinion ; I will simply recall 
one recent and particularly grave fact. On 
28th March 1905, the French Cardinals met 
and drew up a document in which they 
appeared to make a point of showing con- 
temporary France that they are ignorant of 



104 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

the very elements of its constitution. They 
addressed to the President of the Republic 
a joint letter, a proceeding equally repre- 
hensible whether they were ignorant of the 
fact that the chief magistrate of the country 
has no authority to receive documents of 
such a nature, or whether they knew it and 
wished to show that they were above the 
law. It is hardly necessary to add that the 
letter had no result. 

After this proceeding, as solemn as it was 
inopportune, their Eminences returned to their 
dioceses where they are moaning and praying 
for the France which does not listen to them. 

From various quarters appeals were made 
to the bishops to meet together and talk 
about the impending separation, to discuss 
it with one another and with their priests, 
even with the public and in the face of public 
opinion, and to co-operate in the task that 
was on foot. 1 These appeals were not listened 
to. The bishops evidently feared that their 
co - operation would not be accepted. The 
very idea of opening their mouths in an 
environment where their words will have only 
their human value, is antipathetic to them. 

With bishops such as have been described, 

1 See, for example, "Politique Religieuse et Separation" 
by the Abbd H. Hemmer. 



POSITION OF THE CLERGY IN FRANCE 105 

it is not difficult to imagine what the lower 
clergy will be like. The secular priests of 
France are a picked body of men, remarkable 
for its solidarity, homogeneous character and 
decorum, but, like all great organisms, the 
clerical body is dogged by special maladies. 
That particular kind of formalism which might 
be called pharisaism, has a greater hold on 
the clergy than on any other body of officials, 
together with its inseparable twin, sacrosanct 
routine. These, at least, are the troubles that 
first strike the spectator. There are others, 
less apparent but scarcely less formidable. 
The spectre of delation pursues the priest 
without respite. It is the fear of being 
denounced, the terror lest their most innocent 
movements may be misinterpreted or misre- 
presented, that have given so many French 
priests those shrinking manners which revolt 
the layman, and, even more than the cassock, 
confine and isolate the priest. In almost every 
parish there is some good soul to supply 
the bishops palace with information as to 
the books that the curd reads and the 
company that he keeps. Round every bishop 
is formed as if by instinct a group of 
benevolent and well-intentioned spies, who 
keep watch on Monseigneur for the benefit 
of friends — usually residing in Rome. 



106 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

In all this there is no element of deliberate 
organisation, but it is all the more impressive 
on that account. Among the cardinals of 
the Curia there are generally three or four 
who employ their ample leisure in collating 
the oddest dossiers, with the notion that in 
this way they would be acquainted with the 
personnel of the Church, if at the next Con- 
clave Almighty God thought proper to impose 
on them the heavy charge of the pontificate. 

The parochial clergy are formed in semi- 
naries, the methods of which were perhaps 
excellent in the seventeenth century but have 
since then undergone no change. All the 
education that the child destined for the 
priesthood receives seems to have for its 
aim the setting up of a wall of separation 
between him and his fellow-citizens. The 
young priests in Paris, when they come out 
of Saint- Sulpice, have never had a single 
newspaper at their disposal. These men 
who are called to evangelise the France of 
to-day are wholly ignorant of her. They 
have been taught to make mince - meat of 
Nestorius and Eutyches, but they have been 
left in ignorance of all the problems that are 
presented to the contemporary conscience. 

However, some among them have found 
out some corners of nature and reality, and, 



POSITION OF THE CLERGY IN FRANCE 107 

convinced that their Church is divine, they 
wish to confront the perishing multitudes, 
to speak to them, to reclaim them, to con- 
vince them. In the ardour and enthusiasm 
of their five-and-twenty years they give them- 
selves to work, study and research. They 
gain a degree of licentiate 1 and sometimes a 
doctors biretta. 

One would imagine that the hierarchy 
would show special favour to such men as 
these. Nothing of the sort. As a rule 
the bishops are anxious and troubled about 
■ 'these fellows." I state the fact without 
venturing to interpret it. What is certain 
is, that one could draw up very astonishing 
statistics, if one studied — for example, in the 
diocese of Lyons — the career of priests who 
have taken degrees of licentiate, and com- 
pared it with that of priests who have not 
even the degree of Bachelor of Letters. 

The Church has never canonised ignorance, 
but in some dioceses the course of events 
suggests that the bishops wish to put a 
premium on it. 2 There is, however, a modern 

1 [Equivalent to the English degree of Master of Arts, but 
not, like the latter degree at Oxford and Cambridge, a mere 
matter of fees for any one who has already taken a Bachelor's 
degree. It is, on the contrary, much more difficult to obtain 
than the degree of Bachelor.] 

2 See "La ReTorme Intellectuelle du Clerge," by V. P, 
Saintyves (Paris, 1904) 



108 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

virtue on which they look with still greater 
disapproval — initiative. That is, indeed, the 
sin against the Holy Ghost ! the germ of all 
heresy. And so it comes about that wherever 
we turn we see the Church cutting itself off 
from the democracy. 

But, it will be said, cannot the Church, 
which on Good Friday, at the moment of the 
adoration of the Cross, prays for the Jews ; 
the Church which since the first age of its 
existence has in accents of infinite emotion 
besought the Lord to gather in His love all 
mankind into a single family ; the Church 
which has always sighed after unity and 
universality ; cannot this Church find a new 
language in which it may throw across to 
the democracy a bridge of prayer, which, as 
it were, built by faith and love, shall bring 
the two civilisations together. 

With this dream in my mind I walked 
up a few days ago to that church on Mont- 
martre, that " basilica of the National Vow," 
in which the French Catholicism of our genera- 
tion has symbolised its dreams and aspirations. 
It was night. None of the sounds of the 
great city crossed the threshold of the temple. 
On the altar the monstrance glowed, surrounded 
by lights and flowers. All at once a hymn 
burst forth, sung only by mens voices : — 



POSITION OF THE CLERGY IN FRANCE 109 

" Pitie, mon Dieu, c'est pour notre patrie 
Que nous prions au pied de cet autel . . . 
Pitie, mon Dieu ! si votre main chatie 
Un peuple ingrat qui semble vous braver, 
Elle commande a la mort, a la vie, 
Par un miracle elle peut nous sauver. 

"Refrain — Dieu de clemence, 
O Dieu vainqueur, 
Sauvez Rome et la France 
Au nom du Sacre-Coeur." 1 

A shudder and a pang went through me. 
For in these voices that prayed for France 
I heard the rage, the rancour, the impreca- 
tions of a moribund who will neither reconcile 
himself to death nor recognise himself again 
in his heirs. 

I conclude, then, this sketch of the position 
of the Church by saying that what has ruined 
the Church in France is not its dogmas but 
its politics, or rather, to be perfectly just and 
accurate, the disreputable manoeuvres by 
which the Church has been monopolised 
without, unhappily, making an indignant 
protest before the world. 

1 " Pity ! my God, it is for our country that we pray before 
this altar. Pity ! my God, if Thy hand should chasten this 
ungrateful people which seems to defy Thee, life and death are 
in Thy hands, by a miracle Thou canst save us. {Refrain) 
God of Mercy, O God most mighty, save Rome and France in 
the name of the Sacred Heart" 



Ill 



CONSEQUENCES OF THE DENUNCIATION OF THE 

CONCORDAT 

My hand would have refused to write the 
foregoing pages if* I had had nothing to 
add to them. 

That part of the Church in which the 
upholders of all forms of servitude have 
taken refuge in their spite and terror, still 
powerful by reason of the resources that 
persons haunted with visions analogous to 
those of the year iooo may in an access of 
infatuation throw at its feet — that part of 
the Church is moribund ; nay, it is already 
dead. 

But is this Church the whole Church ? To 
that question, which my readers must have 
continually put while reading what has gone 
before, I am happy to be able to reply with 
a joyous " No." 

My joy will astonish those who know that 
I am not a member of the Church. It is, 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 111 

nevertheless, real and profound. Life rejoices 
me wherever I come across it. There is no 
discussion with corpses. 

Once more, the free thinkers who confuse 
the Church with clericalism are to be excused, 
since the Church herself has never clearly- 
separated her cause from that of clericalism ; 
but observers who wish to make a study of 
religious categories must, if they do not want 
to be misled, pay considerable attention to 
minorities. Now, while the immense majority 
of French Catholics were compromising the 
cause of the Gospel and the faith, there were 
being sown in a few country presbyteries, in 
a few cells of seminarists or monks, the seeds 
of a new order of things. 

I am on dangerous ground for those whom 
I admire. In every corner of Catholic France 
there are benevolent inquisitors who, for 
various motives, set up as informers against 
their colleagues. 1 Delation is, perhaps, the 
most shameful and the least known stain on 

1 "In reading certain articles," says M. Fonsegrive, the 
editor of the Quinzaine^ "one perceives the joy that certain 
persons feel at the downfall, the open heresy of some Catholic 
priest or layman whom they dislike. Like the birds that come 
and fly round houses over which death is hovering, they shout 
for joy in the mere expectation of a corpse. Foul and unclean 
birds ! We can never feel enough scorn for their spiteful 
dispositions, enough pity for their sorry plight, enough sorrow 
for their blindness." 



112 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

the French clergy. It is necessary that these 
pages should not serve as an indictment in 
the hands of the Holy Office detectives. I 
shall therefore mention only facts that are 
public property, and merely a small part of 
what might be said. 

That a remarkable change has taken place 
among the Catholic clergy of France from the 
scientific point of view has been made patent 
by the marvellous success of the works of the 
Abbe Loisy. The books of the celebrated 
exegetist were not addressed to the public at 
large. Free thinkers, as a rule, have not very 
well understood the crisis brought about by 
this priest who wishes to remain a priest. 
Protestants have glanced at him without 
interest, and, understanding no more than 
the others, have passed by, imagining that 
M. Loisy 's exegesis is little more than a 
reproduction of Protestant exegesis. It is, 
therefore, chiefly in Catholic circles that M. 
Loisy has met, on the one hand, with enthusi- 
astic friends and disciples, on the other, with 
inveterate opponents. 

The uproar was great. Though in appear- 
ance pacified, it only waits an opportunity to 
manifest itself afresh in a painful, nay, tragic 
form. 

What Loisy has done by acquiring liberty 







^4 fU 



7 



! 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 113 

of exegesis, M. Chaine and the Abb6s Dabry, 1 
Lemire, Naudet have done from the political 
point of view ; Canon Ulysse Chevalier, Mgr. 
Duchesne, the Abbe Houtin and Father 
Delehaye, from the historical point of view. 
M. Edouard le Roy has just done the same 
thing with brilliant success on what is with 
us the delicate ground of dogma. Never, 
for centuries, have Catholics been heard to 
speak in this tone. On a sudden the abyss 
between them and freedom of thought dis- 
appeared. 

M. Edouard le Roy is a layman, but is 
not that very fact significant? Is it not a 
strangely novel spectacle to see a member 
of the Ecclesia credens—oi the " disciplined 
Church " — rising, and with equal simplicity 
and firmness demanding explanations from 
his mother ? The Catholics of yesterday and 
those of to-morrow are at one in chanting 
with a like faith and an equal affection : Credo 
unam sanctam Catkolicam et Apostolicam 
Ecclesiam (I believe one holy Catholic and 
Apostolic Church), but the former have made 
it a kind of point of honour to trust them- 
selves to their mother with their eyes shut. 
They experience a voluptuous sensation in 

1 It is to M. Dabry that we owe the witty remark : " Could 
there not be a pilgrimage of priests going to be baptized men?" 

H 



114 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

throwing themselves into her arms and sleep- 
ing there, forgetful of the tempest that rages 
round them. The others open their eyes — 
sometimes from curiosity, sometimes from 
valour and manliness. There is no contradic- 
tion between the two states of mind. Father 
Portali6, S.J., has lifted his hands to heaven 
and cried: "It is the end of Catholicism!" 1 
No, my dear reverend father, it is the end 
of one Catholicism and the advent of a new 
Catholicism, or rather it is the rising of new 
sap in the old religious trunk. 

Holy Mother Church may be ill-advised 
enough to disown, in a fit of anger, the 
children of her womb — though I have a 
great difficulty in believing that at this 
solemn moment she will make the deci- 
sive move (Numquid oblivisci potest mater 
infantem suum ?) — but she cannot expunge 
from history the fact that she is their 
mother. 

There is, then, no question of heresy or 
schism. The anti-clerical associations and the 
few Protestant sects that watch the movement 
of Catholic reformation in the hope that it will 
end by coming their way are deluding them- 
selves completely. It is something deeper 

1 Etudes des PP. //suites, 82 Rue Bonaparte, Paris, 20th July 
1905, p. 162. 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 115 

and more organic than the movement of the 
"Evades" 1 

Protestantism, for which I have the highest 
possible respect and a little admiration, has 
scattered over French territory a number of 
seemly places of worship. There are some 
for all tastes, or nearly so. And yet the men 
whom I have in mind will not for a moment 
think of taking refuge in them. The reason 
is simple. They look upon Protestantism as 
a great historical fact, but a fact of the past. 
"We are no longer in the period of partial 
heresies/' says M. le Roy, and, having thus 
by a stroke of the pen announced to the 
reforming experiments of the past how 
inadequate they are to meet the needs of 
the present, he goes on to say that "it is 
the very idea of dogma that repels and gives 
scandal." This takes us as far from Dr 
Harnack and from Calvin or Luther as from 
the stereotyped clericalism which thinks itself 
the only orthodoxy. 

"No authority/' says M. le Roy, "can 
compel me to hold a given argument sound 
or unsound : above all, no authority can make 
this or that conception with or without mean- 

1 [The name given to a considerable number of French 
priests (according to some, as many as nine hundred) who 
have left the Church within the last few years.] 



116 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

ing to me. I do not say merely that authority 
has not the right to do this, but that the thing 
is radically impossible, for ultimately it is I who 
think, not the authority that thinks for me. 
Against this fact nothing can possibly prevail. 
Nor can I force or forbid myself to find the 
evidence satisfactory in this or that case ,J 

(P- 507) 

Here we have a peculiarly flat non ftossuntus. 
And it should be remembered that it appeared, 
not in an isolated pamphlet launched on the 
world by its author and involving no other 
responsibility, but in the Quinzaine, the 
brilliant review which Professor Fonsegrive 
("Yves le Querdec ") has edited for the last 
ten years. The group to which M. le Roy 
belongs must therefore feel themselves strong 
enough to face without very much concern 
the lamentations and the wrath of their 
opponents. 

Such facts as these make what is happening 
in France of intense interest. The wails of 
those who exclaim against " spoliation " and 
"persecution" are all of a sudden drowned 
in trumpet-blasts from unexpected quarters. 
One swallow does not make a summer, but 
one has only to take a point of vantage for 
a moment to see them arriving from all points 
of the compass. A weekly review has just 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 117 

been started at Lyons with the title of 
Demain? the prospectus of which strikes a 
note of confidence : — 

11 Catholic France is dying. But she is 
succumbing far less to the attacks of her 
enemies than to her own shortcomings and 
to the disfigurements that she has inflicted on 
herself with her own hand. Cursory observers 
are surprised at the failure of our religion — 
which, in fact, is neither understood nor 
practised rightly — to preserve the spiritual 
life which is ebbing away from us. Yet no 
phenomenon could be more explicable than 
this sterility : Catholic France is becoming 
less and less Christian. Certainly the external 
forms of religion remain. But the vessel of 
election is daily voiding itself of its spiritual 
and moral content. To such an extent is 
this the case that with many of our people 
there survives little more than the habit of 
forms and ceremonies of which they no longer 
know the inner significance nor experience the 
fruitfulness. Can one be astonished if the 
phantom of religion continues to be ineffective ? 
It is our business first of all to heal ourselves 
of our own disease. It is clearly demonstrated 
that we must seek primarily in ourselves the 
origin of those symptoms of social decadence 
which so many pharisees — for ever smiting the 
breasts of others — take a melancholy pleasure 

1 Subscription for Great Britain and all countries in the 
postal union, ios. a year post free. Offices : 2 Rue Simon- 
Maupin, Lyons. 



118 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

in lamenting, without ever having the humility 
to lay the blame on themselves. We shall, 
therefore, not so much contend with outside 
enemies as cut out the canker from our own 
hearts. We shall hunt down intellectual evils 
among the multitude. If Christianity is to 
survive in France, it must cut itself off from 
all the parties of reaction, from intellectual no 
less than from political and social reaction. 
The critical spirit has penetrated every 
domain : nothing can stop its progress. The 
better way is to accommodate ourselves to it 
and to make use only of scientific methods. 
For us, every demonstrated truth will be an 
orthodox truth." 

I know well that some may think that we 
have here a shrewd manoeuvre to mislead 
public opinion, a movement of the "rallies" 
in a new form. But what right have we to 
suspect the good faith of those who wrote 
or signed this document? There are words 
that have an accent which cannot be mis- 
taken. What I can vouch for from certain 
knowledge is that the appeal of Demain would 
have been signed by hundreds of ecclesiastics, 
had not the fear of Mgr. Turinaz, 1 Mgr. 

1 [Bishop of Nancy. He has published several pamphlets 
attacking all new ideas. His lordship was severely handled 
by the Abbe* Laberthonniere in an article published in the 
Annates de Philosophie Chrttienne for January 1906. He 
has just published a reply to the present book, in which he 
denounces as heretics all Catholics— even the most moderate 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 119 

Delassus, 1 the Abbe Maignen, 2 or Pere 

— who have any modern or progressive ideas, and declares that 
it will be to the eternal honour of the French Church that not a 
single Catholic who had not already "abandoned his faith" was 
on the side of the " traitors " in the Dreyfus affair. This is 
an interesting confirmation of M. Sabatier's remarks on page 
85 ante. The Comite catholique pour la defense du droit, which 
was originally formed to support the demand for the revision of 
the Dreyfus case, has issued a public protest against his lord- 
ship's imputations which is signed by some half-dozen well-known 
Catholic laymen and contains the following paragraph : — 

" Alas ! it is only too true that the great majority of our 
co-religionists blindly followed the accusers of the Jewish 
officer. We have no desire to revive old quarrels, but we may 
be permitted to say that we have to-day to deplore only too 
bitterly the disastrous consequences of that attitude, which 
certainly does not justify what is now happening, but in part 
explains it." 

The members of the Comite, though few, include such dis- 
tinguished Catholics as MM. Berenger, Paul Viollet, Edouard 
Aynard and Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu.] 

1 [Canon of Cambrai ; one of the protagonists of the diabolist 
and anti-Masonic movement ; author of " L'Americanisme et 
la Conjuration anti-chretienne " (Lille: Desclee, 1899), which 
contains much original information {e.g. that Lord Beaconsfield 
was Prime Minister of England for forty years in succession) 
and horrible revelations as to the connection of Cardinal 
Gibbons, Archbishop Ireland, and other American Catholic 
ecclesiastics with Freemasonry and other Satanic agencies. 
In recognition of Canon Delassus' literary labours, the present 
Pope conferred upon him, on 7th May 1904, the title of Mon- 
signore, with the rank of Domestic Prelate to His Holiness ; 
and the Catholic University of Lille gave him the degree of 
Doctor of Theology honoris causd. Mgr. Delassus enjoys also 
the special favour and confidence of the Archbishop of Cambrai, 
who has made him editor of the Semaine Religieuse, or official 
diocesan magazine of Cambrai. See Appendix II., p. 169.] 

2 [A protagonist in the campaign against " Americanism " ; 
author of "Le Pere Hecker est-il un Saint?" (Rome and 
Paris, 1898), "La Souverainete du Peuple est une He're'sie 5 



120 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

Fontaine, 1 caused the pen to fall from their 
hand. 

As I was writing these lines I received the 
October number of the Annates de Philosophie 
Chritienne, of which the Abbe Laberthonniere 
has recently become editor. The tone of his 
introductory article is very similar to that of 
Demain. All who are interested in the 
evolution of ideas ought to read it. The 
conductors of the Annates have been fortunate 
enough to find in St Augustine (" De Trin." 
ix. i) a passage which the most modern 
philosophers would not repudiate. They 
have adopted it as their motto : " Seek, 
then, as those seek who needs must find, and 
find as those who needs must seek again ; 
for it is said : ' He who has reached the 
goal has but made a start.' " 

The pages that follow breathe a delightful 
atmosphere of faith in truth and in the 
future, of cheerful optimism. One would 
like to quote the whole article. The new 
directors of the review regard belief, not as 
a stoppage of thought, but, on the contrary, as 

(Paris: Roger, 1892), " Nouveau Catholicisme et Nouveau 
Clerge" (Paris, 1902), and other works.] 

1 [One of the most prominent French Jesuits, and a regular 
contributor to the Verite Frangaise ; author of " Les infiltra- 
tions protestantes et le clerge francais," 3 volumes (Paris, 1901- 
1905).] 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 121 

a spring, so to speak, intended to put thought 
in motion. 

"If there are any who on the pretext of a 
firm and constant faith think or act as though 
they considered that they ought not to make 
their belief a subject of reflection and thus 
become rooted in a verbal, stereotyped and 
exclusive dogmatism, we tell them that, far 
from growing up to the measure of the truth, 
as they imagine, they are dwarfing the truth 
to their own measure, and far from coming out 
of themselves, they are shutting themselves in 
(p. 10). . . . Every submission that does not 
come from the very depths of one's being, 
that is not a voluntary adhesion, arising from 
spiritual motives, becomes by that very fact 
illusory and worthless (p. 15). . . . No 
authority, whatever it may be, can ever 
effect in us, without our own co-operation, 
anything of value for the development of our 
moral and religious life (p. 17). ... If we 
wish to content ourselves with being Catholics 
' by grace/ that is to say, without any valid 
reason for being so, we not only run the risk 
of ceasing to be Catholics at all, we have, in 
fact, ceased to be so, whatever appearance of 
Catholicism we may preserve (p. 20). . . . 
None can contest our right, if we wish to 
exercise it, to demonstrate to the initiates of 
the Eleusinian mysteries, from the spiritual 
abode which as faithful followers of Christ 
we inhabit under the protection of Peter, that 
even their most esoteric thoughts neither 



122 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

escape nor terrify us, and that if they desire 
to seek the light, to love the truth and to 
cultivate liberty of soul to the last degree, 
they should join themselves to us (p. 21)." 

I do not think that I am mistaken in 
saying that free thinkers will consider these 
expressions entirely legitimate, and that their 
most undoubted representatives will hail 
them with joy. 

It may be asked how Rome could tolerate 
in France a Catholicism different from that 
of the rest of Catholicity. It might be 
answered that Rome has always shown her- 
self ready to be very accommodating, pro- 
vided that she received a liberal supply of 
the external marks of respect that she con- 
siders her due. Already the Neapolitans 
figure in the same religious statistics as 
English Catholics ; yet how great are the 
intellectual and moral differences between the 
clients of St Januarius and the Catholics 
formed in the school of Newman. It is 
therefore allowable to believe that there may 
figure in the same statistics to-morrow other 
Catholics who will still display such differences. 

There is another reason why the Church will 
not have to grant special privileges to France, 
namely, the fact that the crisis through which 
French Catholicism is passing, is also mani- 






DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 123 

festing itself in all other countries. If any one 
thinks that I look at the facts too much from an 
individual point of view, I would refer him to 
the Civilta Cattolica of 3rd February 1906, 
pages 257-273, where it is stated that an 
international movement is spreading in the 
various countries of Europe. It is mani- 
fested everywhere at once, and in most 
unexpected forms. Even the Italian semi- 
naries, in spite of their prison doors and the 
close supervision exercised over the reading 
and the company of the seminarists, are 
nearly all troubled by the new doctrines ; 
while in England an eminent Catholic has 
gone so far as to say that Catholicism will 
have its evolution like Judaism. 

The learned and zealous Roman Jesuits 
who conduct the Civilta Cattolica, terrified 
by the general character of the movement, 
are convinced that there is an organised 
conspiracy, and do me the great honour ot 
supposing that I have a hand in what is 
going on. Alas ! that is not the case ; I am 
hardly more than the watchman, who, from 
the height of his tower, sees the dawn 
breaking a little earlier than the dwellers in 
the plains. 

But I am grateful to the Jesuit Fathers for 
their recognition of the fact that the same 



124 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

symptoms are to be remarked in all Catholic 
countries. The same needs produce every- 
where the same results : the discrepancies 
between intellectual habits of thought and 
the religious life were too great. Men of 
profound and reasoned faith — and they alone 
count — were often faced by the alternative of 
being insincere with themselves or insincere 
towards God. The present crisis is an effort 
to arrive at a new synthesis ; not by an im- 
possible return to the past, but by a vigorous 
step forward. 

To say that the effort will succeed is not 
to play the prophet ; it is merely to state the 
fact that the evolution of ideas cannot be 
arrested. The Church is not an entity ; it is 
the totality of Catholics. The day when all 
Catholics have passed through the crisis 
which is now manifesting itself on all sides, 
the Church will be called upon neither to 
condone nor to condemn ideas which will be 
as much its own as are very different ideas 
to-day. 

The " young Catholics " are legion, and 
henceforth nothing will stop them. All the 
Catholics of whom I have been speaking 
have divined the new destinies towards which 
France is marching. People go about saying 
that France is anti-Christian and anti-religious. 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 1S5 

Those who say so find it necessary to believe 
it in order to have an excuse for cursing the 
national aspirations. But in reality the 
French people are only anti - clerical, and 
clericalism, in their conception, is, in the 
widest sense of the term, the traffic in holy 
things. They are astonished, scandalised, 
indignant, when they see a priest becoming a 
political " boss " in the interest of the Count de 
Chambord or M. Boulanger ; and they are 
hardly less disgusted when a Protestant pastor, 
haranguing the President of the Republic, 
reminds him of the devotion of Protestants 
to democratic institutions. 

The great majority of French free thinkers 
are not, whatever people may say, rabid 
anti-Christians. They showed that when 
M. Loisys last work was published. They 
honestly applauded it, although M. Loisy is 
a far more formidable opponent of their 
cause than are those who give themselves 
out as the accredited defenders of ortho- 
doxy. The apologetic of the thorough-going 
traditionalist may possibly satisfy sacristans 
and Christian Brothers who have no need 
of intellectual activity nor even a notion of 
it ; but it can only compromise the Church 
in the eyes of any person of intellect. 

Among all the interesting scenes afforded 



126 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

by life as it is, I know none more remarkable 
than this unlooked - for coming together of 
neo- Catholics and free thinkers. A great 
intellectual, religious, moral, and social crisis 
is preparing in so many consciences. Doubt- 
less it will never be possible to grasp its 
origin, its extent, or its import. Who will 
tell us the history of the grain while it 
germinates in the bosom of the earth ? I 
have, however, had a momentary glimpse at 
close quarters of this new life that is germi- 
nating in the bosom of the ancient Church, 
and the experience remains an unspeakable 
memory. 

It was in the house of a seminary professor 
whose guest I was a few months ago. In 
the evening a young deacon brought to me 
a large manuscript book, a kind of confidential 
journal, in which for three years some pupils 
of the grand sdminaire had written down 
their thoughts, their difficulties, their ideals, 
their dreams. Never have I seen anything 
so touching in some respects, so remarkable 
and so virile in others. How many times, as 
I passed a file of seminarists, have I not been 
saddened by the prevalence of hypocritical, 
bored, deadened, stupid or coarsely sceptical 
faces. What happiness to think that the 
antiquated regime followed in these establish- 






DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 127 

ments has not succeeded in preventing new 
flowers from blowing! The dominant notes 
in the pages that I read were a vigorous 
craving for sincerity, manliness, effort, initia- 
tive ; an instinctive aversion from the physi- 
cally miraculous, from mechanical devotion, 
rites and incantations ; and at the same time 
an intense love of humanity as it is. 

What will happen when France comes to 
know this new clergy ? when she sees before 
her priests who will not even think of engaging 
in politics ; who, instead of being the slaves of 
the past, will be its grateful, respectful and 
intelligent children ; who will be witnesses 
for the ancient faith as men for whom the 
faith is essentially a power for life, evolution 
and progress ; who, without wasting time in 
the defence or attack of ancient dogmas and 
formulae in which the thought of past ages 
is crystallised, will be the apostles of peace 
among nations, the disinterested co-operators 
in all generous enterprises, the unwearying 
opponents of all iniquities ; who will exhibit 
the Christian not as a man predisposed by 
intellectual abdication to inaction and servitude 
in every form, but as the witness par excellence 
of liberty, on whom no tyranny has a hold. 

I believe that in that day France will thrill 
with indescribable emotion. And, if among the 



128 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

priests of whom I have spoken, and the free 
thinkers at whose side they will quite naturally 
be found, there arise some prophet with over- 
flowing heart and burning words, we shall 
have in this country a revival of faith such 
as no other has known. 

I quite understand that the gentlemen of 
the Holy Office must be growing impatient as 
they try to read between the lines, and I can 
guess what they are asking: " These Catholics 
of whom you speak — will they be within the 
Church or without the Church ? " (which being 
translated into Latin means: " Shall we proceed 
to severities against them ? ") I would gladly 
answer their Eminences' question, if I could ; 
but unhappily historical phenomena refuse 
without compunction to come within the 
categories of our poor intelligences or to be 
filed in our archives. 

There were once upon a time a dozen 
Galilean fishermen who gave the Sacred 
College of their day plenty to do. They 
were extremely bad Jews, since they violated 
the Sabbath, picked and chose among the 
precepts of the law, and even went so far 
as to interpret them ; and yet they were 
extremely good Jews, since it was thanks to 
them, that Judaism became the preface of 
Christianity. It was no more the case then 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 129 

than it will be now that the new destroyed 
the old. The Christianity of to-day, with its 
Pharisees and Sadducees, will pass into history 
and be replaced by a new civilisation. But 
the new will not destroy the old ; it will grow 
out of the old. 1 

If the sketch that I have tried to outline 
is exact, if the events that are occurring in 
France are indeed such as I have described, 
the reader will be able to draw his own con- 
clusions and form his own conception of the 
results of the denunciation of the Concordat. 

I have tried to show that in the Church 
there are two Catholicisms, that of yesterday 
and that of to-morrow. The denunciation of 
the Concordat will complete the ruin of the 
Catholicism of yesterday or clericalism. I am 
aware that clericalism may for some years 
to come seem stronger in the Church than 
ever. In certain conditions a few irresponsible 
people will be enough to bring about outbursts 
of fanaticism. 2 But these will have just as 

1 The reader will find the means of completing what is said 
here in a very interesting volume by the Abbe Klein, " Quel- 
ques Motifs D'esperer" (Paris, 1904). 

2 [This prophecy has already been fulfilled by the disgraceful 
disturbances in Paris and other places in connection with the 
taking of the inventory of church property provided for by the 
Separation Law. In Paris the resistance to the inventory was 
organised by the Royalist and Nationalist parties, and the 
" pious hooligans " (to use the words of the cure of St Clothilde) 

I 



130 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

much importance as the demonstrations of 
the peasants in Brittany or Velay when the 
police are arresting a sorcerer or a char- 
latan. 

The opponents of democracy will shriek and 
howl ; in their terror they will scatter their gold 

who took part in it were chiefly drawn from the Faubourg 
St Germain and the neighbourhood of the Arc de Triomphe. 
In St Clothilde they collected in the choir of the church and 
protected themselves with several rows of footmen, valets and 
hired ruffians. In those rural districts where the Church is strong 
(chiefly in Brittany and certain parts of the South) the peasants 
have been stirred up by being told (of course, falsely) that the 
inventory is a preliminary to confiscation. The whole agitation 
is one more proof of the insincerity of the French clericals. 
The original draft of the Separation Law contained no provision 
for an inventory ; when the measure was before the Briand 
commission, the Opposition members of the commission 
proposed, in the interest of the Church, that an inventory should 
be taken, and the proposal was accepted. It is against this 
provision, inserted in the Law at the request of their own 
representatives, that the clericals are now protesting by 
wrecking their own churches and assaulting officials who are 
only doing their duty. The necessity of the inventory is shown 
by the fact that, as soon as the Separation Law was passed, the 
clergy in the Pas de Calais began selling the ornaments out of 
their churches to dealers from Paris and London ; even the 
Verite Franqaise published letters protesting against the scandal. 
Yet these clergy are the very people who declare that it is 
u sacrilege " to make a list of the ornaments. The Government 
has behaved with extreme forbearance and has shown every 
possible consideration for the feelings of Catholics. One agent 
having demanded that the tabernacle should be opened, the 
Government at once issued an order that the word of the priest 
should be taken for the vessels in the tabernacle. 

The resistance to the inventories has in some places been 
accompanied by serious outrages. Near Le Puy on 2nd March, 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 131 

in handfuls to excite disorders. But the very 
alliance between the parties of reaction and 
the clerical Catholics will only make the dis- 
credit of the latter complete. 

The Catholics of this type have always 
been, so to speak, " dmigres" who have not 

the Government Inspector was fired at as he was proceed- 
ing to the church, and in several other places in the Haute 
Loire and the Hautes Alpes, the rioters have been armed 
not only with scythes and pitchforks, but also with rifles and 
revolvers. In more than one case a deep pit was dug in front 
of the church and covered with branches and snow in anticipa- 
tion of the visit of the officials ; the only victim up to the present 
of this manifestation of practical Christianity has been an 
unfortunate country postman who was seriously injured. -At 
one of the Versailles churches the cure requested the prefect 
and the inspector to enter the church unattended and not to 
introduce the police into the building. They agreed, and, as 
they were walking up the nave, some pious Christians hurled at 
them, from the organ-loft, pieces wrenched off the organ, 
chairs, sacred pictures and other missiles, the vicaires (i.e., the 
curates of the parish) meanwhile egging on their flock. The 
prefect was rather badly hurt. Naturally such proceedings as 
these have revolted every decent person in France ; some of 
the papers that were strongly opposed to Separation, such as 
the Temps, have condemned the agitation severely, as also 
have well-known Catholics such as M. Brunetiere, Count 
d'Haussonville, the Abbe Lemire, the Abbe Gayraud and 
others. Efforts have been made without success to induce 
Cardinal Richard to interfere. Some of the bishops, e.g., the 
Archbishop of Toulouse and the Bishops of Nancy and Quimper, 
are openly encouraging the rioters, as are many of the clergy ; 
still more are, like the Pope and Cardinal Richard, giving 
consent by their silence. 

The rioters, however, represent only a very small fraction of 
the population, and at the time of writing about five-sixths of 
the inventories have been taken, the great majority without 
disturbance.] 



132 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

emigrated. And when clericalism invites us 
to look across to Germany and admire the 
edifying spectacle of William II. seeking the 
support of the Vatican, the French " young 
Catholics " are even more scandalised than 
free thinkers themselves. The proceedings at 
the recent conference of German Catholics 
at Strasbourg deeply affected them. France 
heard the echo of those proceedings with 
profound astonishment and genuine sorrow. 
It may be said that they did not concern us. 
But where is the man who is not affected 
by a shipwreck ? The shouts of joy raised 
by German Catholics saddened us as one is 
saddened by the joy of a poor girl who 
is sacrificing her youth to some financial 
magnate. 

This concentration of clericalism and its 
alliance with despotism will bring the " young 
Catholics " nearer and nearer to the demo- 
cracy and the free thinkers. M. Jaures and 
the Abbe Hemmer have already met on the 
neutral ground of liberty and reason. 1 Last 
winter we had in Paris the novel experience 
of informal debates in which such leaders of 
free thought as M. Buisson, M. Seailles and 
M. Seignobos amicably discussed the question 
of Separation with some of the most prominent 

1 See Hemmer, cp. dL % p. 54. 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 188 

men among the Catholic clergy. These Libres 
Entretiens are going to be continued. 1 

Now this contact between the democracy 
and the " young Catholics'* must inevitably have 
far-reaching effects on the democracy. Already 
there are signs of interest in moral questions 
and of religious aspirations among some of the 
representatives of socialism. In that quarter 
have been found the most efficient workers 
in the campaigns against intemperance, porno- 
graphy, the " white slave" traffic and war. 
This is only a beginning. The French people 
will henceforth understand the futility of 
politics and self-indulgent amusement. They 

1 The Libres Entretiens are conversations that actually take 
place on the most important questions of the day between 
persons desirous of obtaining mutual information by the critical 
method. To these conversations are invited, in a consultative 
capacity, the best-informed men on the question under discus- 
sion that can now be found in Paris. The conversations are 
held at four o'clock on Sunday afternoon every three weeks, in the 
hall of the "Union pour la Verite," 6 Impasse Ronsin, 152 Rue 
de Vaugirard, Paris, where there is accommodation for eighty 
people. Careful verbatim reports of these conversations, 
revised by the speakers themselves, are published every three 
weeks under the title of Libres Entretiens, The subject of 
the current series of discussions, which began on Sunday, 
1 2th November 1905, is Internationalism. It is proposed to 
analyse, objectively and critically, the facts, whether of an 
economic, social, political, juridical or intellectual character, 
which are now modifying the relations between civilised 
nations, with the object of enquiring frankly and without 
prejudice whether these facts of every kind make it necessary 
to revise the traditional information and sentiments in regard 
to patriotism. 



1S4 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

are seeking an ideal which they would not 
seek unless, as Pascal has it, they had already 
found it. 

Listen to the words that are being spoken 
to the French people by some of those to 
whose advice it is most ready to listen — men 
whom the clericalists have tried to discredit 
by calling them the " pontiffs of free thought," 
a Berthelot, a Buisson, a Seailles. Certainly 
there are very many churches whose members 
might be congratulated if they had succeeded 
in finding such men to represent them. 
Pontiffs these of a very novel type, since 
they excommunicate nobody, and constantly 
preach to their faithful the duty of respecting 
all convictions. 

So much the worse for the old Churches 
if they do not perceive what an immense 
change is being effected in the mental attitude 
of the French people ; if they persist in think- 
ing that the most influential leaders of the 
democracy are mere demagogues who whet 
the appetites of the masses by the violence 
of their language. 1 The time for that sort 

1 I am happy to be able to say that the moral and religious 
character of even the most extreme aspirations of the present 
day has been noted by a contemporary Christian writer, M. T. 
Fallot, in " Le Livre de TAction Bonne" (Paris : Fischbacher, 
1905). 

" Revolutionary Socialism," he writes, " is an extraordinarily 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 1S5 

of thing has gone by, and it is not uncommon 
to find in revolutionary tracts pages which 
remind one of Isaiah or St Paul. I do not 
wish to canonise M. Deherme, but, if one 
put on one side of the scales the series of his 
" Co-operation des I dees," and on the other side 
some volumes of the most fashionable sermons, 
in which scale would be the balance of 
religious spirit and disinterested zeal for the 
moral progress of our generation? " Jesus 
said unto them : Verily I say unto you that 
the publicans and the harlots shall go into 
the kingdom of God before you." 

I open the last number of the publication of 
this unbeliever and read : — 

" Never has man had at his disposal so 
great material power, such copious resources, 
never has he been assured of such complete 
security and such steady comfort, and never 
has he been so near to despair and, with all 
his knowledge and his riches, so miserable 
at bottom. Let each one look round him, 
underneath poses and appearances, and look 

complex phenomenon, a world in fusion, wherein good and 
evil — entirely legitimate aspirations and grossly material 
desires — violently contend for the mastery. One must, there- 
fore, rise very high to get anything like a clear and compre- 
hensive view in such chaotic conditions. I am not now 
concerned with the economic significance of the movement, 
but I must say that it is impossible to contest its high moral 
import. It is a passionate protest against iniquity, and an 
immense effort to organise the world on a basis of justice. n 



186 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

sincerely into his own heart. Be he the 
workman toiling in the noisy and dusty factory, 
the peasant bending over his land under the 
sweltering autumn sun, the manufacturer or 
the merchant, the professor, the barrister, or 
the civil servant in any of his many varieties, 
or even the parasite who spends his useless 
days on the race - course and his shameful 
nights in smart taverns, he would admit the 
same disgust of being what he is, with no 
other aim but that whose limitations he has 
realised — with the same weary and hesitating 
desire to be some other than what he is, no 
matter what — if only he may yet have a few 
hours of illusion about himself and the world 
that he has made for himself/' 1 

When a civilisation realises its emptiness 
to this extent, it is not far from the way to 
Damascus. 

To sum up, there are in France at the 
present moment only two categories of 
persons : those who have inherited from the 
past a treasure which they jealously guard 
without being willing to look at it themselves 
or let it be seen by others, and those who, 
whatever be the treasure that has been 
bequeathed them, direct their thoughts, their 
desires, and their steps towards the future. 

The Revolution of 1789 was only a pre- 

1 "Co-operation des I dees," September-October 1905, p. 519. 



DENUNCIATION OF THE CONCORDAT 187 

liminary lightning flash, the anticipation of a 
fundamental and organic reformation. 1 Lay 
France is preparing to write the book of 
which the Declaration of the Rights of Man 
was but one chapter, and in this work lay 
France will be aided by the dlite of the 
clergy. Clericalists may treat these priests as 
apostates ; their cries of hate will not even 
reach the ears of the workers in this great 

1 But for the difficulties created by the Civil Constitution of 
the Clergy, the Revolution would have had a very different 
fate. The (relative) check to the movement of 1789 was 
mainly due to clerical opposition. The majority of clericals, 
remembering- these facts, are now celebrating in advance the 
total suppression of democracy and intoxicating themselves 
with the anticipation of the terrible vengeance of God (of 
which they will naturally be the instruments). I would not 
for the world distress them, but I am bound to tell them that, in 
their enthusiasm, they take no account of the difference between 
the two periods. In 1789 the French people (except their lord- 
ships of the nobility and the higher clergy) was profoundly 
Catholic and ingenuously believing. To-day the French people 
is neither Catholic nor believing. Even in those districts where 
the services are well attended it would be difficult to find any 
considerable number of people, other than illiterates, who 
accept without reserve the whole body of Catholic dogma. 

I would therefore respectfully call the attention of those who 
persistently repeat that the Church has got over many other 
crises to the fact that the present crisis bears no resemblance 
to those that have preceded it. A few years ago the same 
people said much the same thing and defied Parliament to 
pass the laws against the monks. The laws were passed and 
put in force ; the monks departed, and not only did France 
fail to rise in their defence, but the demonstrations that were 
adroitly organised failed utterly and miserably. The poor 
monks were obliged to cross the frontier amid general 
indifference. 



138 DISESTABLISHMENT IN FRANCE 

cause. There will then be a new Catholicism 
in which earnestness, hard work, manliness, 
love will be the supreme virtues, a Catholicism 
which will resemble the old no more than 
the butterfly resembles the chrysalis, and yet 
it will be the old, and will be able to-morrow 
to emblazon on the pediments of its temples 
the words of the Galilean : " Non veni solvere, 
sed adimplere " — " I am not come to destroy 
but to fulfil. ,, 



APPENDIX I 

TEXT OF THE LAW OF ioth DECEMBER 1905, 
FOR THE SEPARATION OF THE CHURCHES 
AND THE STATE. 



TITRE PREMIER 

PRINCIPES 

Article premier. La Re- 
publique assure la liberte de 
conscience. Elle garantit le 
libre exercice des cultes sous 
les seules restrictions edictees 
ci-apres dans Pinteret de Fordre 
public. 



Art. 2. La Republique ne 
reconnait,.ne salarie ni ne sub- 
ventions aucun culte. En con- 
sequence, a partir du i er Janvier 
qui suivra la promulgation de 
la presente loi, seront sup- 
primees des budgets de l'Etat, 
des departements et des com- 
munes, toutes depenses relatives 
a l'exercice des cultes. Pour- 
ront toutefois etre inscrites 
auxdits budgets les depenses 
relatives a des services d'aum- 
onerie et destinees a assurer le 
libre exercice des cultes dans 
les etablissements publics tels 



CHAPTER I 

PRINCIPLES 

Art. 1. The Republic assures 
liberty of conscience, . and 
guarantees the free practice of 
religions, subject only to the 
restrictions hereinafter enacted 
in the interest of public order. 

This declaratory clause is carried 
into effect by Article 44 (the last of 
the Act), which repeals all the existing 
laws restricting the practice of religion 
and public worship. Henceforth 
there will be no legal regulations affect- 
ing religious bodies save those con- 
tained in the present law. 

Art. 2. The Republic neither 
recognises nor salaries nor 
subsidises any religion. Con- 
sequently, on and after the first 
day of January next after the 
promulgation of the present 
law, will be omitted from the 
budgets of the State, of the 
departments and of the 
communes, all expenses con- 
nected with the practice of 
religions. Nevertheless, there 
may still be included in the said 
budgets expenses connected 
with the provision of chaplains 
and intended to ensure the free 

139 



140 



APPENDIX I 



que lyce'es, colleges, dcoles, 
hospices, asiles et prisons. 



Les etablissements publics 
du culte sont supprimes, sous 
reserve des dispositions enon- 
cees a Particle 3. 



practice of religions in public 
institutions, such as lycees, 
colleges, schools, hospitals, 
asylums, and prisons. 

The public religious establish- 
ments are hereby suppressed, 
subject to the provisions of 
Article 3 hereof. 

The promulgation of a French law 
by the President of the Republic 
answers to the royal assent in 
England. The present law was pro- 
mulgated on 10th December 1905 ; 
it, therefore, came into force on the 
first of January 1906. The ' ' public 
religious establishments " are those of 
the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish 
bodies recognised by the Concordat, 
whose ministers are paid by the State. 
They are represented by certain legal 
corporations, such as the Conseil de 
Fabrique, or body of churchwardens, 
who are responsible for the mainten- 
ance of the parish church and 
presbytery, and manage the finances of 
a Catholic parish. All these corpora- 
tions are now legally dissolved, 
though by the next Article it is 
provided that they shall continue 
temporarily for a given period, during 
which the State salaries will, of course, 
continue to be paid. 

The provision for the continued 
services of chaplains in public institu- 
tions is necessary to ensure the inmates 
of such institutions religious ministra- 
tions, if they desire them. The 
inclusion of this provision shows the 
absence of anti-religious bias in the 
law. 



TITRE II 



CHAPTER II 



ATTRIBUTION DES BIENS.— 
PENSIONS 

Art. 3. Les etablissements 
dont la suppression est ordonnee 
par l'article 2 continueront pro- 
visoirement de fonctionner, 
conformement aux dispositions 



ASSIGNMENT OF PROPERTY. — 
PENSIONS 



establishments 
suppression is 



Art. 3. The 
of which the 

enacted by Article 2 shall con- 
tinue to exercise their functions 
provisionally, according to their 



APPENDIX I 



141 



qui les regissent actuellement, 
jusqu'a l'attribution de leurs 
biens aux associations prevues 
par le titre IV., et au plus tard 
jusqu'a l'expiration du delai ci- 
apres. 

Des la promulgation de la 
presente loi, il sera procede par 
les agents de l'administration des 
domaines a l'inventaire descrip- 
tif et estimatif : — 

i. Des biens mobiliers et 
immobiliers desdits etablisse- 
ments ; 

2. Des biens de l'Etat, des 
departements et des communes 
dont les memes etablissements 
ont la jouissance. 

Ce double inventaire sera 
dresse contradictoirement avec 
les representaux legaux des 
etablissements ecclesiastiques 
ou eux dument appeles par une 
notification faite en la forme 
administrative. 

Les agents charges de l'inven- 
taire auront le droit de se faire 
communiquer tous titres et docu- 
ments utiles a leurs operations. 



Art. 4. Dans le delai d'un an 
a partir de la promulgation de 
la presente loi, les biens mobi- 
liers et immobiliers des menses, 
fabriques, conseils presbyteraux, 



existing regulations, until the 
assignment of their property to 
the associations provided for 
by Chapter IV., and at latest 
until the expiration of the period 
stated below. 

Immediately after the pro- 
mulgation of the present law, 
the inspectors of the Depart- 
ment of Public Lands shall pro- 
ceed to a descriptive inventory 
and valuation : — 

1. Of the real and personal 
property of the said establish- 
ments. 

2. Of the property of the State, 
of the departments, and of the 
communes, of which the same 
establishments have the use. 

This two-fold inventory shall 
be drawn up in the presence of 
the legal representatives of the 
ecclesiastical establishments, 
who shall have the right to be 
heard thereon, or after they have 
been duly cited by a notification 
in administrative form. 

The inspectors intrusted with 
the inventory shall have the 
right to inspect all title-deeds 
and documents serviceable for 
their work. 

The making of this inventory led 
to the recent disturbances in certain 
French churches. The inventory is, 
of course, absolutely necessary to 
effect the transference of the property 
of the Church to its new legal 
representatives, and is entirely in the 
interest of the Church itself. There 
was no provision for an inventory in 
the original text of the law, and it 
was added at the request of the cleri- 
cal opposition. 

Art. 4. Within a year from 
the date of the promulgation 
of the present law, the real and 
personal property of the menses* 
conseils de fabrique^ presbyteral 



142 



APPENDIX I 



consistoires et autres dtablisse- 
ments publics du culte seront, 
avec toutes les charges et 
obligations qui les grevent et 
avec leur affectation speciale, 
transferes par les representants 
legaux de ces etablissements 
aux associations qui, en se 
conformant aux regies d'organ- 
isation generate du culte dont 
elles se proposent d'assurer 
l'exercice, se seront legalement 
formees, suivant les prescrip- 
tions de Particle 19, pour 
l'exercice de ce culte dans les 
anciennes circonscriptions des- 
dits etablissements. 



Art. 5. Ceux des biens 
d^signe's a Particle prudent 
qui proviennent de PEtat et 



councils, consistories and other 
public religious establishments, 
subject to all the charges and 
obligations with which they are 
encumbered, and without pre- 
judice to any special purposes 
for which any part of them 
may be earmarked, shall be 
transferred by the legal repre- 
sentatives of those establish- 
ments to the associations com- 
plying with the general rules of 
organisation of the religion of 
which they propose to ensure the 
practice, which shall be legally 
formed according to the pro- 
visions of Article 19 for the 
practice of that religion in the 
former districts of the said 
establishments. 

The effect of this clause is to ensure 
that the property shall be transferred 
to the representatives of the religion 
that now has the use of it. The 
principle of the clause is analogous to 
that of the decision of the House of 
Lords in the Scottish Church case. 
Should it ever happen, for instance, 
that Roman Catholics became a very 
small minority, they would retain the 
Church property and the use of the 
cathedrals and churches (Art. 13), 
in every place where they were 
sufficiently numerous to form an 
association under Article 19. Even if 
the whole of the Catholics, with the 
exception of a score, in a commune 
with less than 20,000 inhabitants, 
seceded from the Church, the minority 
recognised by the Bishop would retain 
the church building and property. 
This clause, it will be seen, is extra- 
ordinarily favourable to the Roman 
Catholic authorities and is in itself a 
convincing proof of the conciliatory 
spirit in which the law is conceived. 
(Cf. Art. 8.) The menses are endow- 
ments of bishoprics, chapters, etc., 
dating from before the Concordat. 

Art. 5. That portion of the 
property denoted in the fore- 
going Article which issues from 



APPENDIX I 



143 



qui ne sont pas grev£s (Tune 
fondation pieuse creee posteri- 
eurement a la loi du 18 germinal 
an X feront retour a l'Etat. 

Les attributions de biens ne 
pourront etre faites par les 
etablissements ecclesiastiques 
qu'un mois apres la promulga- 
tion du reglement d'administra- 
tion publique prevu a l'article 
43. Faute de quoi la nullite 
pourra en etre demandee devant 
le tribunal civil par toute partie 
interessee ou par le ministere 
public. 

En cas d'alienation par 
l'association cultuelle de valeurs 
mobilieres ou d'immeubles fai- 
sant partie du patrimoine de 
l'etablissement dissous, le mont- 
ant du produit de la vente devra 
etre employe en titres de rente 
nominatifs ou dans les conditions 
prevues au paragraphe 2 de 
l'article 22. 

L'acquereur des biens alienes 
sera personnellement respon- 
sable de la regularite de cet 
emploi. 

Les biens revendiques par 
l'Etat, les departements ou les 
communes ne pourront etre 
alienes, transformed ni modifies 
jusqu'a ce qu'il ait ete statue 
sur la revendication par les 
tribunaux competents. 



Art. 6. Les associations 
attributaires des biens des 
etablissements ecclesiastiques 
supprimes seront tenues des 
dettes de ces etablissements, 
ainsi que de leurs emprunts, 
sous reserve des dispositions 



the State and is not encumbered 
with a pious foundation of a 
date posterior to the law of 18 
Germinal, Year X, shall revert 
to the State. 

The assignment of property 
shall not be made by the ecclesi- 
astical . establishments until a 
month after the promulgation 
of the public administrative 
bye-law provided for in Article 
43. In the event of an earlier 
assignment, its annulment may 
be claimed in the civil court by 
any interested party or by the 
public prosecutor. 

In the case of alienation by 
the religious association of 
personal or real property form- 
ing part of the patrimony of 
the dissolved establishment, the 
total proceeds of the sale must 
be invested in registered stock 
or used under the conditions 
provided for in the second para- 
graph of Article 22. 

The purchaser of alienated 
property will be personally 
responsible for the regularity 
of this use. 

Property claimed by the 
State, by the departments, or 
by the communes, shall not be 
alienated, converted, or dealt 
with in any way until the claim 
has been adjudicated upon by 
the competent tribunals. 

The law of 18 Germinal, Year X 
(i.e., 18th April 1802), is the law 
which enacted the Concordat and 
the Organic Articles. 

Art. 6. The associations to 
which are assigned the property 
of the suppressed ecclesiastical 
establishments shall be held 
responsible for the debts of those 
establishments, as also for any 
loans that they may have con- 



144 



APPENDIX I 



du troisieme paragraphe du 
present article ; tant qu'elles 
ne seront pas liberees de ce 
passif, elles auront droit a la 
jouissance des biens productifs 
de revenus qui doivent faire 
retour a PEtat en vertu de 
l'article 5. 

Le revenu global desdits 
biens reste affecte au payement 
du reliquat des dettes regulieres 
et legales de l'etablissement 
public supprime, lorsqu'il ne se 
sera forme aucune association 
cultuelle apte a recueillir le 
patrimoine de cet etablissement. 

Les annuites des emprunts 
contractus pour depenses rela- 
tives aux edifices religieux seront 
supportees par les associations 
en proportion du temps pendant 
lequel elles auront l'usage de 
ces edifices par application 
des dispositions du titre III. 

Dans le cas 011 l'Etat, les 
departements ou les communes 
rentreront en possession de 
ceux des edifices dont ils sont 
proprietaires, lis seront respons- 
ables des dettes regulierement 
contractees et afferantes auxdits 
edifices. 

Art. 7. Les biens mobiliers 
ou immobiliers greves d'une 
affectation charitable ou de 
toute autre affectation etrangere 
a Pexercice du culte seront attri- 
bues, par les representants leg- 
aux des etablissements ecclesi- 
astiques, aux services ou etab- 
lissements publics ou d'utilite 
publique dont la destination est 
conforme a celle desdits biens. 
Cette attribution devra etre 
approuvee par le prefet du 
departement ou siege l'etablisse- 



tracted, subject to the provisions 
of the third paragraph of the 
present Article ; so long as they 
have not discharged these 
liabilities they shall have a 
right to the use of the revenues 
of the property reverting to the 
State in pursuance of Article 5. 

The total revenue of the said 
property shall be earmarked for 
the payment of the balance of 
the regular and legal debts of 
the suppressed public establish- 
ment, when no religious associa- 
tion shall have been formed 
that is qualified to take over the 
patrimony of that establishment. 

The interest on loans con- 
tracted for expenses in connec- 
tion with religious buildings 
shall be paid by the associations 
in proportion to the time during 
which they shall have the use 
of such buildings under the 
provisions of Chapter III. 

In case the State, the depart- 
ments, or the communes, shall 
re-enter into possession of 
buildings of which they are 
proprietors, they shall be 
responsible for debts legally 
contracted and attaching to 
the said buildings. 

Art. 7. Personal or real 
property devoted to a charitable 
foundation or to any other pur- 
pose extraneous to the practice 
of religion shall be assigned by 
the legal representatives of the 
ecclesiastical establishments to 
public services or institutions, 
or to services or institutions 
declared " of public utility," the 
purpose of which is similartothat 
of the said foundations. Such 
assignment must be approved 
by the prefect of the Depart- 



APPENDIX I 



145 



ment ecclesiastique. En cas 
de non - approbation, il sera 
statue par decret en Conseil 
d'Etat. 

Toute action en reprise ou 
en revendication devra etre 
exercee dans un delai de six 
mois a partir du jour ou Parrete 
prefectoral ou le decret approuv- 
ant l'attribution aura ete insere 
au Journal Officiel. L'action ne 
pourra etre intentee qu'en 
raison de donations ou de legs 
et seulement par les auteurs et 
leurs heritiers en ligne directe. 

Art. 8. Faute par un etab- 
lissement ecclesiastique d'avoir, 
dans le delai fixe par l'article 4, 
procede aux attributions ci- 
dessus prescrites, il y sera 
pourvu par decret. 

A l'expiration dudit delai, les 
biens a attribuer seront, jusqu'a 
leur attribution, places sous 
sequestre. 

Dans le cas ou les biens 
attribues en vertu de Particle 4 
et du paragraphe i er du present 
article seront, soit des l'origine, 
soit dans la suite, reclames par 
plusieurs associations formees 
pour l'exercice du meme culte, 
l'attribution qui en aura ete 
faite par les representants de 
l'etablissement ou par decret 
pourra etre contestee devant le 
Conseil d'Etat statuant au con- 
tentieux, lequel prononcera en 
tenant compte de toutes les 
circonstances de fait. 



La demande sera introduite 
devant le Conseil d'Etat, dans 
le delai d'un an a partir de la 
date du decret ou a partir de la 



ment in which the ecclesiastical 
establishment is situated. In 
case the approval is withheld, 
the matter shall be decided by 
decree in Council of State. 

Any action for re-entry or 
claim must be taken within six 
months of the day on which the 
prefect's order or the decree 
approving the assignment shall 
have been published in the 
Journal Officiel. Such action 
can be entered only in respect 
of donations or legacies and only 
by the actual donors or their 
descendants in the direct line. 

Art. 8. In the event of an 
association having failed to 
proceed, within the period fixed 
by Article 4, to the assignments 
above prescribed, the assign- 
ment shall be provided for by 
decree. 

At the expiration of the said 
period the property to be as- 
signed shall, until its assignment, 
be placed under sequestration. 

In cases where the property 
assigned in pursuance of Article 
4, and of the first paragraph of 
the present Article, is claimed 
either at once or subsequently 
by several associations formed 
for the practice of the same 
religion, the assignment which 
may have been made of such 
property either by the repre- 
sentatives of the establishment 
or by decree may be contested 
before the Council of State in 
its judicial capacity, which shall 
give its decision after taking into 
account all the circumstances 
of fact. 

The application shall be made 
to the Council of State within a 
year of the date of the decree, 
or of the notification to the pre- 



K 



146 



APPENDIX I 



notification a Pautorite prefector- 
ale, par les representants legaux 
des etablissements publics du 
culte, de l'attribution effectuee 
par eux. Cette notification 
devra etre faite dans le delai 
d'un mois. 

L'attribution pourra etre 
ulterieurement contestee en cas 
de scission dans l'association 
nantie, de creation dissociation 
nouvelle par suite d'une modi- 
fication dans le territoire de la 
circonscription ecclesiastique et 
dans le cas ou l'association 
attributaire n'est plus en mesure 
de remplir son objet. 



fectorial authority, by the legal 
representatives of the public 
establishments of the religion 
concerned, of the assignment 
made by them. Such notifica- 
tion must be made within 
a month of the assignment. 

The assignment may be sub- 
sequently contested in case of 
a division in the association 
possessed of the property, or 
of the creation of a new associa- 
tion in consequence of a change 
in the area of the ecclesiastical 
district ; or in case the bene- 
ficiary association is no longer 
in a position to fulfil its object. 

It has been contended that the 
third paragraph of this clause nullifies 
Article 4 (q.v.), but there is no ground 
for the contention. One of the first 
circumstances of fact that the Council 
of State will have to take into account 
will be the question which of the rival 
associations satisfies the requirements 
of Article 4, i.e., if Catholic associa- 
tions are concerned, which is recog- 
nised by the Bishop in communion 
with Rome. The Council of State 
has no power to set aside the explicit 
provisions of Article 4. 

It was obviously necessary to 
provide some authority to adjudicate 
upon rival claims, and the clerical 
suggestion that the Bishop should be 
the authority could hardly be accepted 
by Parliament. In questions of 
property the State must be 
supreme. 

The last paragraph of this Article 
is a further application of the principle 
of Article 4. Its effect would be that, 
in the event of a priest and the large 
majority of his flock being excom- 
municated by the Bishop, the small 
minority supported by the Bishop 
could secure the property and the 
use of the church ; and in the event 
(an unlikely one ! ) of a whole Catholic 
association seceding from the Church, 
it would lose the property and the 
use of the parish church, provided 
there were enough orthodox Catholics 



APPENDIX I 



147 



Art. 9. A deYaut de toute 
association pour recueillir les 
biens d'un etablissement public 
du culte, ces biens seront 
attribues par decret aux etab- 
lissements communaux d'assist- 
ance ou de bienfaisance situes 
dans les limites territoriales de 
la circonscription ecclesiastique 
interessee. 

En cas de dissolution d'une 
association, les biens qui lui 
auront ete devolus en execution 
des articles 4 et 8 seront 
attribues par decret rendu en 
Conseil d'Etat, soit a des 
associations analogues dans la 
meme circonscription ou, a. leur 
defaut, dans les circonscriptions 
les plus voisines, soit aux etab- 
lissements vises au paragraphe 
premier du present article. 

Toute action en reprise ou en 
revendication devra etre exercee 
dans un delai de six mois a 
partir du jour ou le decret aura 
ete in sere au Journal OfficieL 
L'action ne pourra etre intentee 
qu'en raison de donations ou 
de legs et seulement par les 
auteurs et leurs heritiers en 
ligne directe. 

Art. 10. Les attributions 
prevues par les articles pre- 
cedents ne donnent lieu a 
aucune perception au profit du 
Tresor. 

Art. 11. Les ministres des 
cultes qui, lors de la promulga- 
tion de la presente loi, seront 
ages de plus de soixante ans re- 
volus et qui auront, pendant 



in the parish to form a new associa- 
tion. 

The French Council of State, which 
answers roughly to the English Privy 
Council, is, like the latter, both an 
executive and a judicial body. 

Art. 9. In default of any 
association to take over the 
property of a public religious 
establishment, such property 
shall be assigned by decree to 
the communal institutions for 
poor relief or to the public 
charities situate within the 
boundaries of the ecclesiastical 
district concerned. 

In case of the dissolution of 
an association, the property 
which shall have been conveyed 
to it under Articles 4 and 8 
shall be assigned by decree in 
Council of State either to similar 
associations in the same district 
or, in default of such, in the 
adjoining districts, or to the 
institutions mentioned in the 
first paragraph of this Article. 

Any action for re-entry or 
claim must be taken within six 
months of the date of the 
publication of the decree in the 
Journal OfficieL Such action 
can be entered only in respect 
of donations or legacies and 
only by the actual donors or 
their descendants in the direct 
line. 

Art. 10. The assignments 
provided for by the foregoing 
Articles shall be exempt from 
all Treasury fees. 

Art. 11. Ministers of religion 
who, at the time of the pro- 
mulgation of the present law, 
shall have completed their 
sixtieth year and shall have held 



148 



APPENDIX I 



trente ans au moins, rempli des 
fonctions ecclesiastiques remu- 
nerees par l'Etat recevront une 
pension annuelle et viagere 
egale aux trois quarts de leur 
traitement. 

Ceux qui seront ages de plus 
de quarante - cinq ans et qui 
auront, pendant vingt ans au 
moins, rempli des fonctions 
ecclesiastiques remunerees par 
l'Etat, recevront une pension 
annuelle et viagere egale a la 
moitie de leur traitement. 

Les pensions allouees par les 
deux paragraphes precedents ne 
pourront pas depasser 1,500 fr. 

En cas de deces des titulaires, 
ces pensions seront reversibles, 
jusqu'a concurrence de la moitie 
de leur montant, au profit de 
la veuve et des orphelins 
mineurs laisses par le defunt, 
et jusqu'a concurrence du quart, 
au profit de la veuve sans 
enfants mineurs. A la majorite 
des orphelins, leur pension 
s'eteindra de plein droit. 

Les ministres des cultes 
actuellement salaries par l'Etat, 
qui ne seront pas dans les 
conditions ci-dessus, recevront, 
pendant quatre ans a partir de 
la suppression du budget des 
cultes, une allocation egale a 
la totalite de leur traitement 
pour la premiere annee, aux 
deux tiers pour la deuxieme, a 
la moitie pour la troisieme, au 
tiers pour la quatrieme. 

Toutefois, dans les communes 
de moins de 1,000 habitants et 
pour les ministres des cultes 
qui continueront a y remplir 
leurs fonctions, la duree de 
chaCune des quatre periodes ci- 
dessils indiquee sera doublee. 



ecclesiastical offices salaried 
by the State for at least thirty 
years, shall receive an annual 
pension for life equal to three- 
fourths of their salary. 

Those who shall be more 
than forty-five years of age and 
shall have held ecclesiastical 
offices salaried by the State for 
at least twenty years shall 
receive an annual pension for 
life equal to the half of their 
salary. 

The pensions granted by the 
two foregoing paragraphs shall 
not exceed 1,500 francs (^60). 

In case of the decease of 
their holders, such pensions 
shall be transferable, to the 
extent of one-half of their total 
amount, in favour of the widow 
and orphans under age left by 
the deceased, and to the extent 
of one quarter in favour of a 
widow without children under 
age. When the orphans attain 
their majority their pension 
shall lapse ipso facto. 

Ministers of religion at 
present salaried by the State 
who shall not be in the 
conditions above mentioned 
shall, for a period of four years 
after the suppression of the 
Budget of Religions, receive a 
grant equal to the whole of 
their salary for the first year, 
to two-thirds for the second, 
to a half for the third, and to 
a third for the fourth. 

Moreover, in communes of 
less than 1,000 inhabitants, and 
for ministers of religion who 
shall continue to fulfil their func- 
tions in the same, the duration 
of each of the four periods men- 
tioned above shall be doubled. 



APPENDIX I 



149 



Les departements et les 
communes pourront, sous les 
memes conditions que FEtat, 
accorder aux ministres des 
cultes actuellement salaries par 
eux des pensions ou des alloca- 
tions etablies sur la meme base 
et pour une egale duree. 

Reserve est faite des droits 
acquis en matiere de pensions 
par application de la legislation 
anterieure, ainsi que des secours 
accordes soit aux anciens 
ministres des differents cultes, 
soit a leur famille. 

Les pensions prevues aux 
deux premiers paragraphes du 
present article ne pourront se 
cumuleravec toute autre pension 
ou tout autre traitement alloue, 
a titre quelconque, par FEtat, 
les departements ou les com- 
munes. 

La loi du 27 juin 1885, relative 
au personnel des facultes de 
theologie catholique supprimees, 
est applicable aux professeurs, 
charges de cours, maitres de 
conference et etudiants des 
facultes de theologie protestante. 

Les pensions et allocations 
prevues ci-dessus seront in- 
cessibles et insaisissables dans 
les memes conditions que les 
pensions civiles. Elles cesse- 
ront de plein droit en cas de 
condamnation a une peine 
afflictive ou infamante, ou en 
cas de condamnation pour Fun 
des delits prevus aux articles 34 
et 35 de la presente loi. 

Le droit a Fobtention ou a la 
jouissance d'une pension ou 
allocation sera suspendu par 
les circonstances qui font perdre 



The departments and com- 
munes may, under the 
same conditions as the State, 
grant ministers of religion, 
at present salaried by them, 
pensions or allowances calcul- 
ated on the same basis and for 
the same period. 

These provisions are without 
prejudice to the rights acquired 
in the matter of pensions by 
the effect of previous legisla- 
tion, as well as to assistance 
given to former ministers of the 
various religions or to their 
families. 

The pensions provided for 
in the first two paragraphs of 
the present Article shall not 
be held concurrently with any 
other pensions or stipends paid 
on any title whatsoever by the 
State, the departments, or the 
communes. 

The law of 27th June 1885, 
relating to the personnel of the 
suppressed Faculties of Catholic 
Theology, is applicable to 
professors, lecturers, readers, 
and students of the Faculties 
of Protestant Theology. 

The pensions and allowances 
above provided for shall be 
untransferable and exempt from 
distraint under the same con- 
dition as civil pensions. They 
shall cease ipso facto in case of 
condemnation to penal servitude 
or other degrading punishment 
or in case of condemnation for 
one of the offences provided for 
in Articles 34 and 35 of the 
present law. 

The right to obtain or enjoy 
a pension or an allowance shall 
be suspended by circumstances 
which cause a man to lose his 



150 



APPENDIX I 



la qualite de Francais, durant 
la privation de cette qualite. 



Les demandes 
devront etre, 



sous 



de pension 
peine de 
forclusion, formees dans le delai 
d'un an apres la promulgation de 
la loi. 



French nationality during the 
period of his loss of that nation- 
ality. 

Applications for pensions 
must be made within a year 
after the promulgation of the 
present law ; otherwise they 
will be debarred. 

The salaries now paid are far from 
high. The average salary of a 
country curd is about i.ooo francs 
(^40) a year. Nevertheless it is felt 
by many people in France quite free 
from clericalist sympathies that the 
scale of pensions might reasonably 
have been more generous. The 
ministers of religion concerned are 
in the position of civil servants whose 
posts have been abolished ; and they 
entered their career on the under- 
standing that they would receive 
State salaries for life. The Protestant 
pastors will be the most affected. 



TITRE III 

des Edifices des cultes 

Art. 12. Les edifices qui ont 
ete mis a la disposition de la 
nation et qui, en vertu de la loi 
du 18 germinal an X., servant a 
l'exercice public des cultes ou 
au logement de leurs ministres 
(cathedrales, eglises, chapelles, 
temples, synagogues, arche- 
veches, eveches, presbyteres, 
seminaires), ainsi que leurs 
dependances immobilieres et 
les objets mobiliers qui les 
garnissaient au moment ou 
lesdits edifices ont ete remis 
aux cultes, sont et demeurent 
proprietes de PEtat, des departe- 
ments et des communes. 



Pour ces edifices, comme pour 



CHAPTER III 

ECCLESIASTICAL BUILDINGS 

Art. 12. Buildings which have 
been placed at the disposal of the 
nation and which, in pursuance 
of the Law of 18 Germinal, Year 
X., serve for the public worship 
of the various religions or for 
the housing of their ministers 
(cathedrals, churches, chapels, 
temples, synagogues, arch - 
bishops' and bishops' houses, 
presbyteries, seminaries), to- 
gether with their out-buildings, 
appurtenances and premises, 
and the furniture which they 
contained at the time when 
the said buildings were handed 
over to the religions, are and 
shall remain the property of the 
State, of the departments, and 
of the communes. 

In the case of these buildings, 



APPENDIX I 



151 



ceux, posterieurs a la loi du 
1 8 germinal an X., dont TEtat, 
les departements et les com- 
munes seraient proprietaires, 
y compris les facultes de theo- 
logie protestante, il sera pro- 
cede conformement aux disposi- 
tions des articles suivants. 



Art. 13. Les edifices servant 
a Pexercice public du culte, 
ainsi que les objets mobiliers 
les garnissant, seront laisses 
gratuitement a la disposition 
des etablissements publics du 
culte, puis des associations 
appelees a les remplacer aux- 
quelles les biens de ces etab- 
lissements auront ete attribues 
par application des dispositions 
du titre II. 

La cessation de cette jouis- 
sance, et s'il y a lieu son transfert 
seront prononces par decret, 
sauf recours au Conseil d'Etat 
statuant au contentieux : — 

i° Si l'association bene- 
flciaire est dissoute ; 

2 Si, en dehors des cas de 
force majeure, le culte cesse 
d'etre celebre pendant plus de 
six mois consecutifs ; 

3 Si la conservation de 
l'edifice ou celle des objets 
mobiliers classes en vertu de la 
loi de 1887 et de Particle 16 de 
la presente loi est compromise 
par insuffisance d'entretien, et 
apres mise en demeure dument 
notifiee du conseil municipal, 
ou a son defaut, du prefet ; 

4° Si l'association cesse de 



as of those of a date later than 
the Law of 18 Germinal, Year 
X., of which the State, the 
departments and the communes 
are the proprietors, including 
the Faculties of Protestant 
Theology, the procedure will 
be in accordance with the pro- 
visions of the following Articles. 

The buildings later than the Con- 
cordat, referred to in this Article, are 
those which have been built at the 
public expense, as is the case with 
many modern churches. 

Art. 13. Buildings used for 
public worship, together with 
their furniture and fittings, shall 
be left gratuitously at the 
disposal of the public religious 
establishments, and then of the 
associations called upon to 
replace them to which the 
property of such establishments 
shall have been assigned by 
application of the provisions of 
Chapter II. 

The cessation of this posses- 
sion, and if need be its transfer, 
shall be pronounced by decree, 
with a right of appeal to the 
Council of State in its judicial 
capacity : — 

1. If the beneficiary associa- 
tion is dissolved ; 

2. If, apart from cases of 
force 7najeure y the celebration 
of worship has ceased for more 
than six consecutive months ; 

3. If the preservation of the 
building or of objects scheduled 
under the law of 1887, and 
Article 16 of the present law, 
is endangered by failure to keep 
them in repair ; and after a 
mandamus has been duly served 
by the municipal council or, in 
its default, by the prefect ; 

4. If the association ceases 



152 



APPENDIX I 



remplir son objet ou sies edifices 
sont detournes de leur destina- 
tion ; 

5° Si elle ne satisfait pas 
soit aux obligations de l'article 
6 ou du dernier paragraphe du 
present article, soit aux prescrip- 
tions relatives aux monuments 
historiques. 

La desaffectation de ces 
immeubles pourra, dans les cas 
ci-dessus prevus, etre prononcee 
par decret rendu en Conseil 
d'Etat. En dehors de ces cas, 
elle ne pourra l'etre que par 
une loi. 

Les immeubles autrefois 
affectes aux cultes et dans 
lesquels les ceremonies du culte 
n'auront pas ete celebrees 
pendant le delai d'un an anteri- 
eurement a la presente loi, 
ainsi que ceux qui ne seront pas 
reclames par une association 
cultuelle dans le delai de deux 
ans apres sa promulgation, 
pourront etre desaffectes par 
decret. 

II en est de meme pour les 
edifices dont la desaffectation 
aura ete demandee anterieure- 
ment au i er juin 1905. 

Les etablissements publics 
du culte, puis les associations 
beneficiaires seront tenus des 
reparations de toute nature, 
ainsi que des frais d'assurance 
et autres charges afferentes aux 
edifices et aux meubles les 
garnissant. 



to fulfil its object, or if the 
buildings are diverted from 
their appointed use. 

5. If the association fails to 
fulfil the obligations of Article 
6 or of the last paragraph of the 
present Article or the enact- 
ments relating to historical 
monuments. 

The secularisation of these 
buildings may, in the aforesaid 
cases, be decided by decree of 
the Council of State. Secularisa- 
tion shall not be possible in any 
other case, otherwise than by 
a law. 

Buildings heretofore appro- 
priated to the different religions 
in which public worship shall 
not have been celebrated for 
a year previous to the present 
law, as well as those which 
shall not be claimed by a 
religious association within two 
years after its promulgation, 
may be secularised by decree. 



The same shall hold good 
for buildings, the secularisation 
of which shall have been claimed 
before 1st June 1905. 

The public religious establish- 
ments, and afterwards the 
beneficiary associations, shall 
be held responsible for repairs 
of every sort, as well as for the 
cost of insurance and other 
charges attaching to the build- 
ings and their furniture and 
fittings. 

The first paragraph ensures that 
the church shall in every case be 
granted to the association that receives 
the property under Articles 4 and 8. 

The law of 1887 provides for the 
registration and protection of works of 
art and objects of historical interest. 



APPENDIX I 



153 



Art. 14. Les archeveches, 
eveches, les presbyteres et leurs 
dependances, les grands semin- 
aires et facultes de theologie pro- 
testante seront laisses gratuite- 
ment a la disposition des etab- 
lissements publics du culte, puis 
des associations prevues a 
l'article 13, savoir : les arch- 
eveches et les eveches pendant 
une periode de deux annees ; les 
presbyteres dans les communes 
ou residera le ministre du culte, 
les grands seminaires et facultes 
de theologie protestante, pend- 
ant cinq annees a partir de la 
promulgation de la presente loi. 

Les etablissements et associa- 
tions sont soumis, en ce qui 
concerne ces edifices, aux 
obligations prevues par le 
dernier paragraphe de Particle 
13. Toutefois, its ne seront pas 
tenus des grosses reparations. 

La cessation de la jouissance 
des etablissements et associa- 
tions sera prononcee dans les 
conditions et suivant les formes 
determinees par l'article 13. 
Les dispositions des paragraphes 
3 et 5 du meme article sont 
applicables aux edifices vises 
par le paragraphe i er du 
present article. 

La distraction des parties 
superflues des presbyteres 
laisses a la disposition des 
associations cultuelles pourra, 
pendant le delai prevu au para- 
graphe premier, etre prononcee 
pour un service public par 
decret rendu en Conseil d'Etat. 

A Pexpiration des delais de 
jouissance gratuite, la libre 
disposition des edifices sera 
rendue a l'Etat, aux departe- 
ments ou aux communes. 



Art. 14. Archbishops' and 
bishops' houses, presbyteries, 
and their appurtenances, grands 
seminaires and Protestant theo- 
logical colleges shall be left 
gratuitously at the disposal of 
the public religious establish- 
ments and afterwards of the 
associations indicated in Article 
13, as follows : Archbishops' and 
bishops' houses for two years ; 
presbyteries in communes in 
which the minister of religion is 
resident, grands seminaires and 
Protestant theological colleges 
for five years from the date of the 
promulgation of the present law, 
The establishments and 
associations are subject, in 
regard to these buildings, to 
the obligations provided for by 
the last paragraph of Article 13. 
They will not, however, be held 
responsible for structural repairs. 

The cessation of possession 
by the establishments and 
associations shall be pronounced 
under the conditions and accord- 
ing to the forms laid down by 
Article 13. The provisions of 
paragraphs 3 and 5 of the same 
Article are applicable to the 
buildings indicated by para- 
graph 1 of the present Article. 

The diversion for a public 
purpose of superfluous portions 
of the presbyteries left at the 
disposal of the religious associa- 
tions may, during the period 
provided in paragraph 1, be 
pronounced by decree in Coun- 
cil of State. 

At the expiration of the 
periods of gratuitous possession, 
the free disposal of the buildings 
shall revert to the State, the 
departments, and the com- 
munes. 



154 



APPENDIX I 



Les indemnity de logement 
incombant actuellement aux 
communes, a defaut de pres- 
bytere, par application de 
l'article 136 de la loi du 5 avril 
1884, resteront a leur charge 
pendant le delai de cinq ans. 
Elles cesseront de plein droit 
en cas de dissolution de l'associa- 
tion. 



The cost of housing now fall- 
ing upon the communes which 
have no presbytery, under 
Article 136 of the law of 5th 
April 1884, shall remain at their 
charge for a period of five years. 
In case of the dissolution of the 
association it shall lapse ipso 
facto. 

There are two kinds of seminaries, 
the petits se'minaires (which are 
Church property) where boys in- 
tended for the priesthood enter at 
the age of about 14, and the grands 
seminaires (which are public property), 
to which they proceed later, and which 
answer to theological colleges. 

The public authorities will, of 
course, be able to let or sell the 
buildings mentioned in this Article 
to the religious bodies after the 
expiration of the periods of gratuitous 
use ; and in most cases they will 
doubtless do so. 



Art. 15. Dans les departe- 
ments de la Savoie, de la Haute- 
Savoie et des Alpes-Maritimes, 
la jouissance des edifices ante- 
rieurs a la loi du 18 germinal 
an X., servant a l'exercice des 
cultes ou au logement de leurs 
ministres, sera, attribute par 
les communes sur les territoires 
desquelles ils se trouvent, aux 
associations cultuelles, dans 
les conditions indiquees par les 
articles 12 et suivants de la 
presente loi. En dehors de ces 
obligations, les communes 
pourront disposer librement de 
la propriete de ces edifices. 

Dans ces memes departe- 
ments, les cimetieres resteront 
la propriete des communes. 

Art 16. II sera procede a 
un classement complementaire 



Art. 15. In the departments 
of Savoie, Haute - Savoie, and 
the Alpes - Maritimes, the pos- 
session of buildings of a date 
anterior to the Law of 18 Ger- 
minal, Year X., which serve for 
the worship of the various re- 
ligions and the housing of their 
ministers, shall be handed over 
by the communes of the districts 
in which they are situated to the 
religious associations, under the 
conditions indicated in Articles 
12 and following of the present 
law. Outside these obligations 
the communes shall have the 
free disposal of the ownership 
of these buildings. 

In the same departments the 
cemeteries shall remain the 
property of the communes. 

Art. 16. A complementary 
schedule shall be made of 






APPENDIX I 



155 



des Edifices servant a Pexercice 
public du culte (cathedrales, 
eglises, chapelles, temples, syna- 
gogues, archeveches, eveches, 
presbyteres, seminaires), dans 
lequel devront etre compris 
tous ceux de ces edifices repre- 
sentant, dans leur ensemble ou 
dans leurs parties, une valeur 
artistique ou historique. 

Les objets mobiliers ou les 
immeubles par destination 
mentionnes a l'article 13, qui 
n'auraient pas encore ete in- 
scrits sur la liste de classement 
dressee en vertu de la loi du 
30 mars 1887, sont par l'effet de 
la presente loi, ajoutes a ladite 
liste. II sera procede par le 
ministre de Finstruction publique 
et des beaux-arts, dans le delai 
de trois ans, au classement 
defmitif de ceux de ces objets 
dont la conservation present- 
erait, au point de vue de 
Phistoire ou de Fart, un interet 
suffisant. A l'expiration de ce 
delai, les autres objets seront 
declasses de plein droit. 

En outre, les immeubles et 
les objets mobiliers, attribues 
en vertu de la presente loi aux 
associations, pourront etre 
classes dans les memes con- 
ditions que s'ils appartenaient a 
des etablissements publics. 

II n'est pas deroge, pour le 
surplus, aux dispositions de la 
loi du 30 mars 1887. 

Les archives ecciesiastiques 
et bibliotheques existant dans 
les archeveches, eveches, grands 
seminaires, paroisses, succur- 
sales et leurs dependances, 
seront inventorizes et celles 
qui seront reconnues propriete 
de l'Etat lui seront restituees. 



the buildings used for public 
worship and religious purposes 
(cathedrals, churches, chapels, 
temples, synagogues, arch - 
bishops' and bishops' houses, 
presbyteries, seminaries), in 
which shall be included all such 
buildings as have, as a whole 
or in part, an artistic or historical 
value. 

The furniture or fixtures men- 
tioned in Article 13 which have 
not yet been entered in the 
schedule, drawn up in virtue 
of the law of 30th March 
1887, are by the effect of 
the present law added to the 
said schedule. The Minister of 
Public Instruction and Fine Arts 
shall within three years proceed 
to the definitive registration of 
such of these objects as have 
from the point of view of history 
or art sufficient interest to be 
preserved. At the expiration of 
that period the other objects 
shall ipso facto cease to be 
scheduled. 



Furthermore, the buildings 
and furniture assigned to the 
associations in pursuance of the 
present law may be scheduled 
under the same conditions as if 
they belonged to public institu- 
tions. 

In other respects the pro- 
visions of the law of 30th March 
1887 hold good. 

The ecclesiastical archives 
and libraries in archbishops' 
and bishops' houses, grands 
seminaires, parish churches and 
chapels - of - ease, and their 
dependencies, shall be inven- 
toried, and those which shall be 
recognised as the property of 



156 



APPENDIX I 



Art 17. Les immeubles par 
destination classes en vertu de 
la loi du 30 mars 1887 ou de la 
presente loi sont inalienables et 
imprescriptibles. 

Dans le cas ou la vente ou 
Pechange d'un objet classe serait 
autorise par le ministre de 
Pinstruction publique et des 
beaux-arts, un droit de preemp- 
tion est accord e : i° aux associa- 
tions cultuelles ; 2 aux com- 
munes ; 3 aux departements ; 
4 aux musees et societes d'art 
et d'archeologie ; 5 a PEtat. 
Le prix sera fixe par trois 
experts que designeront le 
vendeur, Pacquereur et le presi- 
dent du tribunal civil. 

Si aucun des acquereurs vises 
ci-dessus ne fait usage du droit 
de preemption la vente sera 
libre ; mais il est interdit a 
Pacheteur d'un objet classe de 
le transporter hors de France. 

Nul travail de reparation, 
restauration ou entretien a faire 
aux monuments ou objets 
mobiliers classes ne peut etre 
commence sans Pautorisation 
du ministre des beaux-arts, ni 
execute hors de la surveillance 
de son administration, sous 
peine, contre les proprietaires, 
occupants ou detenteurs qui 
auraient ordonne ces travaux, 



the State shall be restored 
to it. 

The stringent provisions of this 
and the following Article for the 
protection of ancient buildings and 
other works of art are urgently- 
needed. The clergy have as a rule 
been very bad custodians, and churches 
have been ruthlessly stripped by those 
who should have guarded them. 

Art. 17. Fixtures scheduled 
in pursuance of the law of 
30th March 1887, or of the 
present law, are inalienable and 
imprescriptible. 

In case the sale or exchange 
of a scheduled object shall 
have been authorised by the 
Minister of Public Instruction 
and Fine Arts, a right of pre- 
emption is granted: (1) To 
the religious associations; (2) 
to the communes ; (3) to the 
departments ; (4) to museums 
and societies of art and archaeo- 
logy ; (5) to the State. The 
price shall be fixed by three 
experts nominated by the vendor, 
the purchaser, and the president 
of the civil court. 

If any of the purchasers 
indicated above do not use 
their right of pre-emption, the 
sale shall be an open one ; but 
the purchaser of a scheduled 
object is forbidden to transport 
it out of France. 

No work in the way of repair 
or restoration or otherwise, re- 
quired for buildings scheduled 
as monuments or for scheduled 
moveable objects, maybe entered 
upon without the sanction of 
the Minister of Fine Arts, nor 
carried out except under the 
supervision of his department ; 
and the proprietors, occupiers, or 
holders who shall have ordered 






APPENDIX I 



157 



d'une amende de seize a quinze 
cents francs (16 a 1,500 fr.). 

Toute infraction aux disposi- 
tions ci-dessus ainsi qu'a celles 
de Particle 16 de la presente loi 
et des articles 4, 10, 11, 12 et 13 
de la loi du 30 mars 1887 sera 
punie d'une amende de cent a 
dix mille francs (100 a 10,000 fr.) 
et d'un emprisonnement de six 
jours a trois mois, ou de l'une 
de ces deux peines seulement. 

La visite des edifices et l'ex- 
position des objets mobiliers 
classes seront publiques ; elles 
ne pourront donner lieu a 
aucune taxe ni redevance. 



such work shall be liable to a fine 
of 16 to 1,500 francs. 

Every infraction of the above 
provisions, as also of those of 
Article 16 of the present law, 
and of Articles 4, 10, 11, 12, and 
13 of the law of 30th March 1887, 
shall be punished by a fine of 
100 to 10,000 francs, and by an 
imprisonment of six days to 
three months, or by one or 
other of these penalties singly. 

Scheduled buildings and 
moveable objects shall be open 
to the inspection of the public 
without any charge or fee. 

The fourth paragraph of this Article 
is most valuable. Had there been 
such a provision in English law, our 
churches might have suffered less than 
they have from the " restorer." 

Visitors to France should note that 
it is now illegal to make a charge 
for admission to an ancient church or 
inspection of its works of art . 



TITRE IV 

DES ASSOCIATIONS POUR 
L'EXERCICE DES CULTES 

Art. 18. Les associations 
formees pour subvenir aux frais, 
a l'entretien et a l'exercice 
public d'un culte devront etre 
constitutes conformement aux 
articles 5 et suivants du titre 
premier de la loi du i er juillet 
1 90 1. Elles seront en outre 
soumises aux prescriptions de 
la presente loi. 



CHAPTER IV 

ASSOCIATIONS FOR THE 

PRACTICE OF RELIGIONS 

Art. 18. The associations 
formed to provide for the cost, 
maintenance, and public worship 
of a religion must be constituted 
in accordance with Articles 5 
and following of Chapter I. of 
the law of 1st July 1901. They 
shall, moreover, be subject to 
the provisions of the present 
law. 

The law of 1st July 1901 is commonly 
known as the " Associations Law." 
Chapter I. relates to ordinary associa- 
tions, and its provisions are of a liberat- 
ing character. The other part of the 
law, relating to religious Orders, does 
not apply to the new associations 
which, e.g. , do not require authorisa- 



158 



APPENDIX I 



Art. 19. Ces associations 
devront avoir exclusivement 
pour objet Pexercice d'un culte 
et etre composees au moins : — 

Dans les communes de moins 
de 1,000 habitants, de sept 
personnes ; 

Dans les communes de 1,000 
a 20,000 habitants, de quinze 
personnes ; 

Dans les communes dont le 
nombre des habitants est 
superieur a 20,000, de vingt- 
cinq personnes majeures domi- 
ciliees ou residant dans la 
circonscription religieuse. 

Chacun de leurs membres 
pourra s'en retirer en tout temps, 
apres payement des cotisations 
echues et de celles de l'annee 
courante, nonobstant toute 
clause contraire. 

Nonobstant toute clause con- 
traire des statuts, les actes de 
gestion financiere et d'adminis- 
tration legale des biens accom- 
plis par les directeurs ou 
administrateurs seront, chaque 
annee au moins, presenters 
au controle de Passemblee 
generate des membres de 
l'association et soumis a son 
approbation. 

Les associations pourront 
recevoir, en outre des cotisations 
prevues par Farticle 6 de la loi 
du i er juillet 1 90 1, le produit 
des quetes et collectes pour les 
frais du culte, percevoir des 
retributions : pour les cere- 
monies et services religieux 



tion. They merely have to make a 
declaration in the form prescribed in 
Article 5 of the law of 1st July 1901 ; 
and they can be dissolved only by a 
judgment of a court of law under the 
conditions laid down in Article 23. 

Art. 19. These associations 
must have for their exclusive 
object the practice of a religion, 
and must have a minimu?>i 
membership as follows : — 

In communes of less than 
1,000 inhabitants, seven per- 
sons ; 

In communes of 1,000 to 
20,000 inhabitants, fifteen per- 
sons ; 

In communes the inhabitants 
of which number over 20,000, 
twenty-five adult persons, domi- 
ciled or resident within the 
ecclesiastical district. 

Any of their members may 
retire at any time after payment 
of the subscriptions that are due, 
and of those of the current year, 
notwithstanding any clause to 
the contrary. 

Notwithstanding any clause to 
the contrary in the statutes, the 
acts of financial management 
and of legal administration of 
the property carried out by the 
managers or directors shall be, 
at least once a year, presented 
to the control of the general 
meeting of the members of the 
association and submitted to its 
approval. 

The associations shall be able 
to receive, in addition to the 
subscriptions provided for in 
Article 6 of the law of 1st July 
1901, the product of alms and 
collections for the expenses of 
worship ; and to accept : dona- 
tions for religious ceremonies 



APPENDIX I 



159 



m6me par fondation ; pour la 
location des bancs et sieges ; 
pour la fourniture des objets 
destines au service des fune- 
railles dans les edifices religieux 
et a la decoration de ces edifices. 

Elles pourront verser, sans 
donner lieu a perception de 
droits, le surplus de leurs 
recettes a d'autres associations 
constitutes pour le meme objet. 

Elles ne pourront, sous 
quelque forme que ce soit 
recevoir des subventions de 
l'Etat, des departements ou des 
communes. Ne sont pas con- 
siderees comme subventions les 
sommes allouees pour repara- 
tions aux monuments classes. 



Art. 20. Ces associations 
peuvent, dans les formes deter- 
miners par Particle 7 du decret 
du 16 aoiit 1901, constituer des 
unions ayant une administration 
ou une direction centrale ; ces 
unions seront reglees par l'article 
18 et par les cinq derniers para- 
graphes de Particle 19 de la 
presente loi. 



Art. 21. Les associations et 
les unions tiennent un etat de 
leurs recettes et de leurs 
depenses ; elles dressent chaque 



and services even by founda- 
tions ; fees for the letting of 
benches and seats ; donations 
for the supply of objects for 
funeral services in religious 
buildings, and for the decora- 
tion of those buildings. 

They may, without giving 
occasion to a collection of dues, 
give the surplus of their receipts 
to other associations formed for 
the same object. 

They shall not be able, under 
any form whatsoever, to receive 
subventions from the State, the 
departments, or the communes. 
But those sums will not be 
considered as subventions which 
are allowed for the repair of 
registered monuments. 

The powers conferred by the two 
paragraphs preceding the last are not 
possessed by other associations dt?- 
clardes under the law of 1st July 1901. 
It should be noted that the last para- 
graph enables the State or the local 
authorities to provide funds for the 
repair of ancient cathedrals, churches 
and other ecclesiastical buildings. 

Art. 20. These associations 
may, under the forms prescribed 
by Article 7 of the decree of 
16th August 1 90 1, form unions 
having a central administration 
or directorate ; and these 
unions shall be regulated by 
Article 18, and by the last five 
paragraphs of Article 19 of 
the present law. 

This Article will permit all the 
associations of any religion to be 
formed into one organisation for the 
whole country, if desired, or for any 
lesser area. 

Art. 21. The associations 
and unions shall keep an 
account of their receipts and 
expenditure ; they shall each 



160 



APPENDIX I 



annee le compte financier de 
l'annee ecoulee et Fetat inven- 
torie de leurs biens meubles et 
immeubles. 

Le controle financier est 
exerce sur les associations et 
sur les unions par Fadministra- 
tion de Penregistrement et 
par Finspection generale des 
finances. 

Art. 22. Les associations et 
unions peuvent employer leurs 
ressources disponibles a la 
constitution d'un fonds de 
reserve suffisant pour assurer 
les frais et Fentretien du culte 
et ne pouvant en aucun cas 
recevoir une autre destination ; 
le montant de cette reserve ne 
pourra jamais depasser une 
somme egale, pour les unions 
et associations ayant plus de 
cinq mille francs (5,000 fr.) de 
revenu, a trois fois, et pour les 
autres associations a six fois la 
moyenne annuelle des sommes 
depensees par chacune d'elles 
pour les frais du culte pendant 
les cinq derniers exercices. 

Independamment de cette 
reserve, qui devra etre placee 
en valeurs nominatives, elles 
pourront constituer une reserve 
speciale dont les fonds devront 
etre deposes, en argent ou en 
titres nominatifs, a la Caisse 
des depots et consignations, 
pour etre exclusivement affectes, 
y compris les interets, a Fachat, 
a. la construction, a la decora- 
tion ou a la reparation d'im- 
meubles ou meubles destines 
aux besoins de Fassociation ou 
de Funion. 

Art. 23. Seront punis d'une 
amende de seize francs (16 fr.) 
a deux cents francs (200 fr.), 
et en cas de re'cidive, d'une 



year draw up a balance sheet 
for the past year, and an in- 
ventory of their property real 
and personal. 

Financial control over the 
associations and unions shall 
be exercised by the Inland 
Revenue Department and the 
General Inspectorate of Finance. 

Art. 22. The associations 
and unions may employ their 
available resources in the forma- 
tion of a reserve fund sufficient 
to ensure the expenses and 
maintenance of the religion 
which may not in any case be 
diverted to other purposes ; the 
total of this reserve may never, 
in the case of unions and 
associations with an annual in- 
come of more than 5,000 francs, 
be more than three times, and 
in the case of other associations - 
more than six times the annual 
average of the sums expended 
by each of them on the ex- 
penses of their religion during 
the previous five financial years. 

Independently of this reserve, 
which must be invested in 
registered stock, they shall be 
empowered to form a special 
reserve, the funds of which must 
be deposited in money or regis- 
tered securities at the Govern- 
ment Bank of Deposits, to be 
exclusively employed, along 
with the interest accruing there- 
on, in the purchase, construc- 
tion, decoration, or repair of 
real or personal property for 
the use of the association or 
union. 

Art. 23. The managers or 
directors of an association or 
union who shall have contra- 
vened Articles 18, 19, 20, 21, or 



APPENDIX I 



161 



amende double, les directeurs 
ou administrateurs d'une as- 
sociation ou d'une union qui 
auront contrevenu aux articles 
1 8, 19, 20, 21 et 22. 

Les tribunaux pourront, dans 
le cas d'infraction au parag raphe 
premier de Particle 22, condam- 
ner Passociation ou Punion a 
verser Pexcedent constate aux 
etablissements communaux d'as- 
sistance ou de bienfaisance. 

lis pourront, en outre, dans 
tous les cas prevus au para- 
graphe premier du present 
article, prononcer la dissolution 
de Passociation ou de Punion. 



Art. 24. Les edifices affectes 
a Pexercice du culte appartenant 
a PEtat, aux departements ou 
aux communes continueront a 
etre exemptes de Pimpot foncier 
et de Pimpot des portes et fen- 
etres. 

Les edifices servant au loge- 
ment des ministres des cultes, 
les seminaires, les facultes de 
theologie protestante qui appar- 
tiennent k PEtat, aux departe- 
ments ou aux communes, les 
biens qui sont la propriete des 
associations et unions sont sou- 
mis aux memes impots que 
ceux des particuliers. 

Les associations et unions 
ne sont en aucun cas assujetties 
a la taxe d'abonnement ni a 
celle imposee aux cercles par 
Particle 33 de la loi du 8 aout 
1890, pas plus qu'a Pimpot de 
4 0/0 sur le revenu etabli par 



22 shall be liable to a fine of 
16 to 200 francs and in the 
case of a second offence to a 
fine double that amount. 

The Courts shall be em- 
powered, in case of infraction of 
the first paragraph of Article 22, 
to condemn the association or 
union to hand over any excess 
to the communal institutions 
for poor relief or to public 
charities. 

They may also, in all cases 
provided for in the first para- 
graph of the present Article, 
declare the dissolution of the 
association or union. 

This Article lays down the only 
circumstances in which a religious 
association can be compulsorily dis- 
solved. It is left to the option of the 
Court to pronounce dissolution or not. 

Art. 24. Buildings appropri- 
ated to public worship which 
belong to the State, the depart- 
ments, or the communes, shall 
continue to be free from land- 
tax and the door and window- 
tax. 

Buildings which serve for 
the housing of ministers of 
religion, seminaries, and facul- 
ties of Protestant theology 
which belong to the State, the 
departments, or the communes, 
and the property belonging to 
the associations or unions are 
subject to the same taxes as 
those belonging to private 
persons. 

The associations and unions 
are not in any case subject to 
the taxe d? abonnement, nor to 
that imposed on clubs by 
Article 33 of the law of 8th 
August 1890, nor to the four 
per cent, income-tax established 



162 



APPENDIX I 



les lois du 28 decembre 1880 et 
du 29 decembre 1884. 



by the laws of 28th December 
1880, and of 29th December 
1884. 

The taxe d' abonnement is a special 
tax imposed on corporations, chiefly 
to take the place of death duties. 



TITRE V 

POLICE DES CULTES 

Art. 25. Les reunions pour 
la celebration d'un culte tenues 
dans les locaux appartenant a 
une association cultuelle ou mis 
a sa disposition sont publiques. 
Elles sont dispensees des for- 
malites de Particle 8 de la loi 
du 30 juin 1 88 1, mais restent 
placees sous la surveillance des 
autorites dans l'interet de l'ordre 
public. Elles ne peuvent avoir 
lieu qu'apres une declaration 
faite dans les formes de l'article 
2 de la meme loi et indiquant 
le local dans lequel elles seront 
tenues. 

Une seule declaration suffit 
pour l'ensemble des reunions 
permanentes periodiques ou ac- 
cidentelles qui auront lieu dans 
l'annee. 



Art. 26. II est interdit de 
tenir des reunions politiques 
dans les locaux servant habitu- 
ellement a Fexercice d'un culte 



CHAPTER V 

REGULATIONS OF PUBLIC 
WORSHIP 

Art. 25. Assemblies for the 
celebration of worship held in 
places belonging to a religious 
association or placed at its 
disposal must be public. They 
are dispensed from the formali- 
ties of Article 8 of the law of 
30th June 1 88 1, but they remain 
subject to the supervision of 
the authorities in the interest 
of public order. They may be 
held only after a declaration has 
been made according to the 
forms prescribed by Article 2 
of the same law naming the 
place in which they are to be 
held. 

A single declaration is 
sufficient for the whole of the 
regular, periodical, or occasional 
assemblies held during the year. 

Article 8 of the law of 30th June 
1881 relates to public meetings. The 
effect of the present Article is that 
places of worship will have to be 
annually registered as such. 

Any religious body that did not 
form associations could, of course, 
hold private services or services to 
which the public were admitted, but 
these latter would be subject to the 
ordinary conditions of public as- 
semblies. 

Art. 26. It is forbidden to 
hold political meetings in places 
regularly used for public 
worship. 



APPENDIX I 



163 



Art. 27. Les ceremonies, 
processions et autres manifesta- 
tions exterieures d'un culte con- 
tinueront a etre reglees en con- 
formite des articles 95 et 97 de 
la loi municipale du 5 avril 1884. 

Les sonneries de cloches 
seront reglees par un arrete 
municipal, et en cas de dis- 
accord entre le maire et le 
president ou directeur de Fas- 
sociation cultuelle, par arrete 
prefectoral. 

Le reglement d'administra- 
tion publique prevu par Farticle 
43 de la presente loi determin- 
es les conditions et les cas 
dans lesquels les sonneries 
civiles pourront avoir lieu. 



Art 28. II est interdit, a 
l'avenir, d ; elever ou d'apposer au- 
cun signe ou erribleme religieux 
sur les monuments publics ou 
en quelque emplacement public 
que ce soit, a ^exception des 
edifices servant au culte, des 
terrains de sepulture dans les 
cimetieres, des monuments fun- 
eraires, ainsi que des musees 
ou expositions. 



Art. 29. Les contraventions 
aux articles precedents sont 
punies des peines de simple 
police. 

Sont passibles de ces peines, 
dans le cas des articles 25, 26 
et 27, ceux qui ont organise la 
reunion ou manifestation, ceux 
qui y ont participe en qualite 



Art. 27. Ceremonies, pro- 
cessions, and other out - door 
demonstrations of religion shall 
continue to be regulated accord- 
ing to Articles 95 and 96 of the 
municipal law of 5th April 1884. 

The ringing of bells shall be 
regulated by municipal decree 
and, in case of disagreement 
between the mayor and the 
president or manager of the 
association, by order of the 
prefect. 

The public administrative 
bye-law provided for by Article 
43 of the present law shall lay 
down the conditions and the 
cases in which ringing shall take 
place for civil purposes. 

The present law in regard to out- 
door religious processions, etc., which 
is maintained by this Article, gives 
the mayor or the prefect the power to 
veto them if they threaten to lead to 
disorder. 

Art. 28. It is forbidden for 
the future to erect or fix any 
religious sign or emblem on 
public monuments or in any 
public place whatsoever, with 
the exception of buildings used 
for worship, places of burial in 
cemeteries, monuments of the 
dead, and museums or exhibi- 
tions. 

This provision is considered by 
many French people to be unreason- 
able. It does not, of course, involve 
the removal of existing emblems. 

Art. 29. Contraventions of 
the foregoing Articles shall be 
punished by simple police 
penalties. 

In the case of Articles 25, 
26 and 27, those who have 
organised the meeting or demon- 
stration, those who have taken 
part in it as ministers of religion, 



164 



APPENDIX I 



de ministres du culte, et dans 
le cas des articles 25 et 26, ceux 
qui ont fourni le local. 

Art. 30. Conform ement aux 
dispositions de Particle 2 de la 
loi du 28 mars 1882, Penseigne- 
ment religieux ne peut etre 
donne aux enfants ages de six 
a treize ans, inscrits dans les 
ecoles publiques, qu'en dehors 
des heures de classe. 

II sera fait application aux 
ministres des cultes qui enfrein- 
draient ces prescriptions, des 
dispositions de Particle 14 de 
la loi precitee. 

Art. 31. Seront punis d'une 
amende de seize francs (16 fr.) 
a deux cents francs (200 fr.) et 
d'un emprisonnement de six 
jours a deux mois ou de Pune 
de ces deux peines seulement 
ceux qui, soit par voies de fait, 
yiolences ou menaces contre un 
individu, soit en lui faisant 
craindre de perdre son emploi 
ou d'exposer a un dommage sa 
personne, sa famille ou sa 
fortune, Pauront determine' a 
exercer ou a s'abstenir d'exercer 
un culte, a faire partie ou a 
cesser de faire partie d'une 
association cultuelle, a contri- 
buer ou a s'abstenir de contri- 
buer aux frais d'un culte. 

Art. 32. Seront punis des 
memes peines ceux qui auront 
empeche, retarde ou interrompu 
les exercices d'un culte par des 
troubles ou ddsordres causes 
dans le local servant a ces 
exercices. 

Art. 33. Les dispositions des 
deux articles precedents ne 
s'appliquent qu'aux troubles, 
outrages ou voies de fait, dont 
la nature ou les circonstances 



and in the case of Articles 25 
and 26, those who have supplied 
the place of meeting shall be 
liable to these penalties. 

Art. 30. In accordance with 
the provisions of Article 2 of 
the law of 28th March 1882, 
religious teaching may be given 
to children between the ages 
of six and thirteen on the 
registers of the public schools 
only outside school hours. 

The provisions of Article 14 
of the law above mentioned 
shall be applied to ministers 
of religion infringing these 
prescriptions. 

Art. 31. A fine of from 16 
to 200 francs and imprisonment 
of six days to two months or 
one of these penalties singly 
will be inflicted on those who 
by assault, violence, or threats 
against an individual, or by 
making him fear the loss of 
his employment, or by exposing 
his person, family, or fortune to 
injury, shall have determined 
him to practise or refrain from 
practising a religion, to join or 
leave a religious association, to 
contribute or abstain from con- 
tributing to the maintenance of 
a religion. 



Art. 32. The same penalties 
shall be inflicted on those who 
shall have hindered, delayed, or 
interrupted the services of a 
religion by brawling or disorder 
in the place used for those 
services. 

Art. 33. The provisions of the 
two foregoing Articles apply only, 
to those disorders, outrages, on 
assaults the nature or circum- 
stances of which shall not call 



APPENDIX I 



165 



ne donneront pas lieu a de 
plus fortes peines d'apres les 
dispositions du Code penal. 

Art. 34. Tout ministre d'un 
culte qui, dans les lieux ou 
s'exerce ce culte, aura publique- 
ment, par des discours pro- 
nonces, des lectures faites, des 
ecrits distribues ou des affiches 
apposees, outrage ou diffame 
un citoyen charge d'un service 
public, sera puni d'une amende 
de cinq cents francs a trois 
mille francs (500 fr. a 3,000 
fr.) et d'un emprisonnement de 
un mois a un an, ou de l'une 
de ces deux peines seulement. 

La verite du fait diffamatoire, 
mais seulement s'il est relatif 
auxfonctions, pourra etre etablie 
devant le tribunal correctionnel 
dans les formes prevues par 
l'article 52 de la loi du 29 juillet 
1881. Les prescriptions edictees 
par l'article 65 de la meme loi 
s'appliquent aux delits du present 
article et de l'article qui suit. 

Art. 35. Si un discours pro- 
nonce ou un ecrit affiche ou dis- 
tribue publiquement dans les 
lieux ou s'exerce le culte, con- 
tient une provocation directe a 
resister a l'execution des lois ou 
aux actes legaux de l'autorite 
publique, ou s'il tend a soulever 
ou a armer une partie des 
citoyens contre les autres, le 
ministre du culte qui s'en sera 
rendu coupable sera puni d'un 
emprisonnement de trois mois 
a deux ans, sans prejudice des 
peines de la complicite, dans le 
cas ou la provocation aurait ete 
suivie d'une sedition, revolte ou 
guerre civile. 



for the severer penalties of the 
Penal Code. 

Art. 34. Any minister of 
religion who, in the places in 
which the services of such 
religion are held, shall, by 
discourse delivered, by reading, 
by distribution or placarding of 
written or printed notices, have 
publicly insulted or defamed 
a citizen holding a public 
office, shall be punished with 
a fine of 500 to 3,000 francs, 
and an imprisonment of a month 
to a year, or one of these 
penalties singly. 

Justification of the slander, 
provided only that it relates 
to the official capacity of the 
person defamed, maybe pleaded 
before the correctional court in 
the form provided by Article 52 
of the law of 29th July 1884. 
The provisions of Article 65 of 
the same law apply to offences 
under the present and the follow- 
ing Article. 

Art. 35. If a discourse 
delivered or a document pla- 
carded or publicly distributed 
in the places in which worship 
is held, contains a direct pro- 
vocation to resist the execution 
of the laws or the legal acts 
of public authority, or tends to 
arouse or arm one section of the 
citizens against the others, the 
minister of religion who shall 
be guilty of it shall be punished 
with an imprisonment of three 
months to two years, without 
prejudice to the penalties of 
complicity in cases wherein the 
provocation may have been 
followed by sedition, revolt, or 
civil war. 

It should be noted that this and the 



166 



APPENDIX I 



Art. 36. Dans le cas de 
condamnation par les tribunaux 
de simple police ou de police 
correctionnelle, en application 
des articles 25 et 26, 34 et 
35, l'association constitute pour 
l'exercice du culte dans 1 l'im- 
meuble ou Tinfraction a ete 
commise sera civilement re- 
sponsable. 



previous Article refer only to action v 
in a place of worship. Ministers of 
religion are subject to no special 
regulations outside their churches. 

Art. 36. In the case of a 
condemnation by the police or 
correctional courts, under 
Articles 25 and 26, 34, and 35, 
the association established for 
the practice of religion in the 
building where the infraction has 
been committed shall be civilly 
responsible. 



TITRE VI 
DISPOSITIONS GENERALES 

Art. 37. L'article 463 du 
Code penal et la loi du 26 
mars 1891 sont applicables a 
tous les cas dans lesquels la 
presente loi edicte des penalites. 

Art. 38. Les congregations 
religieuses demeurent soumises 
aux lois des i er juillet 1901, 4 
decembre 1902 et 7 juillet 1904. 



Art. 39. Les jeunes gens qui 
ont obtenu a titre d'eleves 
ecclesiastiques la dispense pre- 
vue par Particle 23 de la loi du 
15 juillet 1889, continueront a 
en beneficier conformement a 
l'article 99 de la loi du 21 
mars 1905, a la condition qu'a 
Page de vingt-six ans ils soient 
pouvus d'un emploi de ministre 
du culte retribue par une as- 
sociation cultuelle et sous 



CHAPTER VI 

GENERAL REGULATIONS 

Art. 37. Article 463 of the 
Penal Code and the law of 
26th March 1891 are applicable 
to all cases in which the present 
law provides penalties. 

Art. 38. The religious 
congregations shall remain 
subject to the laws of 1st July 
1 90 1, 4th December 1902, and 
7th July 1904. 

By "religious congregations" is 
meant the religious Orders, and the 
laws referred to are the Associations 
Law and complementary statutes. 

Art. 39. Young men who as 
ecclesiastical students have ob- 
tained the dispensation allowed 
by Article 23 of the law of 15th 
July 1 889, shall continue tobeneflt 
by it according to Article 99 of 
the law of 21st March 1905, on 
condition that at the age of 
twenty-six years they are pro- 
vided with a ministerial appoint- 
ment salaried by a religious 
association and subject to con* 



APPENDIX I 



167 



reserve des justifications qui 
seront fixees par un reglement 
d'administration publique. 



Art. 40. Pendant huit an- 
nees /a partir de la promulga- 
tion de la presente loi, les 
ministres du culte seront in- 
eligibles au conseil municipal 
dans les communes ou ils exer- 
ceront leur ministere ecclesias- 
tique. 

Art. 41. Les sommes ren- 
dues disponibles chaque an- 
nees par la suppression du 
budget des cultes seront re- 
parties entre les communes au 
prorata du contingent de la 
contribution fonciere des pro- 
prietes non baties qui leur aura 
ete assigne pendant l'exercice 
qui precedera la promulgation 
de la presente loi. 

Art. 42. Les dispositions 
leg ales relatives aux jours ac- 
tuellement feries sont main- 
tenues. 

Art. 43. Un reglement d'ad- 
ministration publique rendu 
dans les trois mois qui suivront 
la promulgation de la presente 
loi determinera les mesures 
propres a assurer son applica- 
tion. 

Des reglements d'administra- 
tion publique determineront les 
conditions dans lesquelles la 
presente loi sera applicable a 
l'Algerie et aux colonies. 



ditions to be fixed by a public 
administrative bye-law. 

The dispensation referred to is from 
military service. 

Art. 40. For eight years from 
the promulgation of the present 
law, ministers of religion shall 
not be eligible for the municipal 
council in the communes in 
which they exercise their ecclesi- 
astical functions. 

Art. 41. The sums made 
available each year by the 
suppression of the Budget of 
Religions, shall be divided 
between the communes in pro- 
portion to the amount of land- 
tax on vacant land which shall 
have been assigned to them 
during the financial year pre- 
ceding the promulgation of the 
present law. 

Art. 42. The legal provisions 
relating to days which are at 
present public holidays shall 
remain in force. 

Art. 43. A Public Adminis- 
trative Bye-law drawn up within 
the three months after the pro- 
mulgation of the present law, 
shall lay down the measures 
proper to ensure its application. 

Public Administrative Bye- 
laws shall lay down the con- 
ditions under which the present 
law shall be carried out in 
Algeria and the Colonies. 

This Article follows the usual prac- 
tice in French legislation. The Bye- 
law, which was promulgated on 16th 
March 1906, contains 53 Articles, 
divided into four Chapters. Its effect 
is to maintain and even extend (so 
far -as is possible) the liberty of 
action given to the Churches by the 
Law. 



168 



APPENDIX I 



Art. 44. Sont et demeurent 
abrogees toutes les disposi- 
tions relatives a Porganisation 
publique des cultes anterieure- 
ment reconnus par PEtat, ainsi 
que toutes dispositions con- 
traires a la presente loi et 
notamment : — 

i° La loi du 18 germinal an 
X., portant que la convention 
passee le 26 messidor an IX. 
entre le pape et le gouvernement 
francais, ensemble les articles 
organiques de ladite convention 
et des cultes protestants, seront 
executes comme des lois de la 
Republique ; 

2° Le decret du 26 mars 1852 
et la loi du i er aout 1879 sur ^ es 
cultes protestants ; 

3 Les decrets du 17 mars 
1808, la loi du 8 fevrier 1831 et 
Pordonnance du 25 mai 1844 sur 
le culte israelite ; 

4° Les decrets des 22 de- 
cembre 1812 et 19 mars 1859; 

5 Les articles 201 a 208, 260 
a 264, 294 du Code penal ; 

6° Les articles 100 et 101, les 
paragraphes 11 et 12 de Particle 
136 et Particle 167 de la loi du 
5 avril 1884 ; 

7° Le decret du 30 decembre 
1809 et Particle 78 de la loi du 
26 Janvier 1892. 



Art. 44. All enactments relat- 
ing to the public organisation of 
the religions previously recog- 
nised by the State, as well as 
all enactments contrary to the 
present law, are hereby 
repealed, and notably : — 

1. The Law of 18 Germinal, 
Year X., providing that the Con- 
vention passed on 26 Messidor, 
Year IX., between the Pope 
and the French Government, 
together with the Organic 
Articles of the said Convention 
and of the Protestant religions, 
shall be carried out as laws of 
the Republic ; 

2. The decree of 26th March 
1852, and the law of 1st August 
1879, on tne Protestant religions ; 

3. The decrees of 17th March 

1808, the law of 8th February 
1831, and the ordinance of 25th 
May 1 844, on the Jewish religion ; 

4. The decrees of 22nd 
December 18 12, and 19th March 

i859; 

5. Articles 201 to 208, 260 to 

264, and 294 of the Penal Code ; 

6. Articles 100 and 101, para- 
graphs 11 and 12 of Article 126 
and Article 167 of the law of 
5th April 1884 ; 

7. The decree of 30th December 

1809, and Article 78 of the law 
of 26th January 1892. 

The Convention of 26 Messidor, 
Year IX. {i.e. 26th September 1S01), 
is, of course, the Concordat. This 
Article, as has already been said, 
repeals all existing restrictions and 
regulations on religious bodies with- 
out exception other than the very 
few cases in which they are explicitly 
re-enacted in the present law [e.g. 
Article 27). 



APPENDIX II 



AN INTERVIEW WITH A SOUL IN PURGATORY 

The issues of the Semaine Reli%ieuse of Cambrai for the 4th, 
nth and 18th of November 1905 show that Mgr. Delassus 
has been encouraged by the approval given in exalted quarters 
to his previous efforts, to continue his excursions into the 
nether-world. This time, however, it is purgatory, not hell, 
that claims his attention. He prints in these three numbers, 
under the appropriate title of " Varietes? what purports to be 
an exact and authentic account of purgatory, given by one 
who has been there. The lady interviewed is a deceased nun 
of the convent of the Ladies of the Visitation of St Mary, 
at Saint-Cere, called Sister Mary- Sophia, who, accompanied 
by her guardian angel, spent several days in the cell of 
a living member of the community, Sister Margaret- Mary, 
and apparently submitted to a searching examination on the 
part of the latter, who reports the result. It is true that the 
interview took place some years ago, namely, in 1863, and we 
are not told whether the interviewer wrote shorthand, or what 
other means she took to secure an accurate report, but it is 
said that she wrote down her account of the prolonged inter- 
view immediately after the return of her colleague to the other 
world. The interview occupies many pages of the Semaine 
Religieuse, and it is unnecessary to give it in full, but some 
selected specimens of the questions and answers will be 
sufficient to show the kind of mental pabulum provided for 
the faithful of the diocese of Cambrai. A naive statement 
by Sister Margaret- Mary, which is appended to the interview, 
must first be quoted in full : — 

" Our worthy confessor, the Abbe Augusson, asked me twice 
in confession whether I would take an oath that what I saw 

169 



170 APPENDIX II 

and heard was true. I replied that I would ; that, after that, 
if I were deceived, I should deceive others ; but that, as for 
taking an oath that I believed it all to be true, I would do 
so without hesitation." 

Here are some of the questions and answers : — 

Q. Where is purgatory ? 

R. In the centre of the earth, close to hell. 

Q. Are there many residences in purgatory ? 

R. There are three, and in each are a large number of 
divisions, according as the soul is more or less guilty. 

Q. In which residence are you ? 

R. In the middle one. 

Q. Do people always stay in the same residence, or are they 
moved from one to another as their sins are expiated ? 

R. So far as I am concerned, I have always stayed in the 
same residence. 

Q. Do you know whether, in the residence nearest to hell, 
they hear the shrieks of the damned ? 

R. No, they do not, except in the case of some of the more 
guilty souls who hear them by divine permission. 

Q. Are there many people in purgatory ? 

R. Yes, a great many ; picture to yourself a fair ; it is 
crowded, packed. 

Q. I am surprised that my poor mother has stayed so long in 
purgatory [this refers to previous information] ; I thought she 
was in heaven long ago. 

R. You ought not to be surprised at that ; seventeen years 
is a very long time, it is true ; but there are souls who have 
been kept there for two or three hundred years. 

Q. And are there many nuns ? 

R. Yes, a large number ; but none of those who have kept 
their rule. [/.<?., they go straight to heaven, as a matter of 
course ! ] 

Q. What are the sins most severely punished in purga- 
tory? 

R, Failure in obedience and grumbling against superiors ; 
God punishes the latter with great severity. [The ethics of 
this reply are delightfully characteristic^ 

Q. What sufferings do the demons inflict on the souls in 
purgatory ? 



APPENDIX II 171 

R. They have no power to injure them ; but they give them 
a great deal of suffering by reproaching them with their sins, 
or by simply showing themselves to them. 

Q. Do the souls in purgatory pray and carry on conversa- 
tion ? What is, in fact, their occupation ? 

R. Yes, they pray ; they say mentally the Pater and Ave 
and other prayers for those who are interested in them. They 
never speak ; there is a profound silence, only one hears some- 
times groans extracted by the severity of the pain ; but, never- 
theless, they are always calm and resigned. Their occupation 
is to love God and to accomplish His will, in order to be more 
and more united to Him. 

Q. Is the favour attached to the sabbatine Indulgence 

effective? [Tkis is the Indulgence attacked to the wearing 

of the brown Car7nelite scapular ; those who gain it will be 

fetched out of purgatory by Our Lady o?i the Saturday after 

their death I ] 

R. The Indulgence is true ; but it rarely has its ejfect on 
account of the obstacles that people put in its way. 

Q. Is the fire visible in purgatory ? 

R. Yes. Imagine a limekiln of which the walls and the roof 
are nothing but fire. You will understand that one is roasted ; 
nevertheless, certain souls there endure a glacial cold. 

Q. My Sister, did you get the advantage of the five Masses 
that were said for you ? 

R. No ; only of three. 

Q. And has the Mass that M. PAbbe told me he would say 
for you been applied to you ? 

R. (With an air of embarrassment) No. (The Abbe had told 
me to ask this question, and had not yet said the Mass ; but 
that was his secret.) 

Q. What is the cause of the great light that I saw in the 
night, before you came to talk to me? 

R. It was a sign to tell you that I had need of prayers. 

Q. How did you get the religious costume? Is the cross 
silver, the habit woollen, the guimpe linen ? What will you do 
with them when you go to heaven ? 

R. (The Sister laughed as she said this.) Oh ! don't be 
uneasy, I shall have no difficulty about that. All this is only 
an aerial body, a phantasm. 

Q. You say that you have an aerial body ; but, in that case, 



172 APPENDIX II 

how is it that when I gave you holy water, my three fingers 
that touched yours were burnt? 

R. God permitted it to give you a sign, and be sure that the 
pain which you felt then was nothing in comparison with what 
I am suffering. 

Q. Will your purgatory soon be finished ? 

Here the interviewer continues : — I heard a voice which was 
not that of Sister Mary- Sophia, but which seemed to come 
from her right, and from a person who was her superior, and 
who said to me in a tone of authority : " Pray, and tell the 
others to pray and offer some intentions at Holy Communion." 

I was so terrified that I rushed away as fast as possible ; I 
thought I should never find the door of the cell. Sister Mary- 
Sophia called out to me : " Do not be afraid, Sister," but I 
heard nothing and fled at a gallop. 

The next day, however, I was a little reassured, and came 
back to ask Sister Mary-Sophia some more questions. First : 

Q. What was that voice yesterday that told me to pray for 
you, and offer some intentions for you at Holy Communion ? 

R. It was the voice of my guardian angel. You should not 
have run off so quickly : if you had stayed, he would no doubt 
have told you something else. 

Further on we come to the following question and answer : — 

Q. What gives the most prompt relief to the souls in 
purgatory ? 

R. First, the holy sacrifice of the Mass and Holy Communion : 
next, indulgences. The observance by religious of their rule 
also gives them great consolation. 

Before departing to heaven Sister Mary-Sophia gives Sister 
Margaret-Mary an instruction on the Mass, in the course of 
which she declares (among other extravagances) that prayer 
offered during the consecration in the Mass will enable a soul 
in "a state of mortal sin" to "go away justified." This seems 
to have been too much even for Mgr. Delassus, who adds in a 
footnote the explanatory words "by perfect contrition." No 
doubt : but Sister Mary-Sophia does not say so. 

We have also a dialogue between the Mother Superior of the 
convent and Sister Margaret-Mary, in which the latter gives a 
ludicrous description of the personal appearance of Sister 
Mary-Sophia down to her finger-nails. 



APPENDIX II 178 

Subsequently, we are told, Sister Margaret- Mary's deceased 
mother called on her on her way from purgatory to heaven 
(that is, from the centre of the earth to the sky, the Ptolemaic 
astronomy being apparently still in vogue in the diocese of 
Cambrai) and had long conversations with her on the 3rd and 
25th of July 1863. These, however, Mgr. Delassus does not 
transcribe, as he says they would " teach M his readers "hardly 
anything further." He states, however, that on the occasion 
of the second visit the apparition touched one of the scars on 
Sister Margaret- Mary's hands and healed it immediately, the 
other two remaining as before. 

The interview is accompanied by certificates dated 21st and 
26th July 1863, an( * signed by a Dr Maury, to the effect that 
one of the Sister's burnt fingers healed spontaneously and 
suddenly, whereas the others remained scarred, but the scars 
fell off from time to time, and were immediately replaced by 
others exactly like them. 

The certificates are, of course, intended to assist the credulous 
to accept this collection of mediaeval fantasies as a genuine 
revelation. Nor will that be difficult, since the interview only 
represents what is taught in convent schools as being, for all 
practical purposes, of faith. 



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